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Dr. Robert Ashe

Dr. Robert Ashe Side 1

INTERVIEW OF DR. ROBERT ASHE
This is Dean Smith, speaking to Dr. Robert Ashe is Prescott on May 29, 1991.
DS: Bob, you came to Glendale in what, '45?
RA: 1946.
DS: '46. As Superintendent of the high school.
RA: July 1, 1946.
DS: But you had been in Glendale a long time before that, in the area.
RA: Oh, we lived in Glendale in 1930, '31 when I was a senior in high school. I graduated from high school about the first of June, 1931.
DS: From Glendale High.
RA: Glendale High, then fifteen years later I went back as Superintendent of the District. When I went back there were still seven teachers there that'd been there when I was there.
DS: Is that right. Do you remember who they were?
RA: Well I think I can name some of them. ...Rauch, H. L. Renick, Sarah ..., Winifred Smith, ...Weiss, uh, Carey.
DS: Oh, Carey's dead, yeah. How bout Gale Van Camp?
RA: Yeah, Gale Van Camp.
DS: He wasn't on the faculty.
RA: No, he wasn't on the faculty, but he was a very influential member on the campus.
DS: That's right, mm-hmm.
RA: He was there before Mr. Yelman in fact. I think Gale Van Camp started working for the school district as early as 1920, and he was the head custodian. I relied on Van Camp for a lot of information and a lot of counseling 'cause Van was a man who could listen and didn't have to talk all of the time. But when you'd ask him was to size things up, he would be willing to make his judgment known. Yes, I appreciated him very much. He was a very fine man. He was a good, a good employee. He was very loyal to the school district, he was loyal to the staff. Very cooperative, and if he didn't think something was quite right, he didn't hesitate to say so, but if you overruled him, that was alright. In other words, he didn't hold it against you at all. When I went there the district had just started growing, right after World War II. And my predecessor, Mr. Yelman, had indicated one of the things we had to do was to look forward to making to doing to do some more building to take care of the student body. I don't remember exactly the number of students, I think there were around 650 students. But I went there in 1946, and the school was growing at about 100 students per year, maybe a little more than that. And so we had to start thinking about additional school facilities.
DS: Had you added Sunnyslope by that time?
RA: No, Sunnyslope came about following a study that we had made by the professors at the University of Southern California. They recommended that we build a school in the Sunnyslope area. And they said that we should build one in the Washington area. Because of our growth. It was very evident that the growth was going to continue and evan increase in numbers, and it did. I think we opened the school in Sunnyslope in 1950, and then, even the Sunnyslope proposition was not a particularly popular one in the Glendale area. A lot of the people in Glendale thought that if we built a school in Sunnyslope it would prevent drawing the people from the Sunnyslope area to the Glendale area for their marketing. Thought they wouldn't come over and patronize the stores. Well, as a matter of fact, they weren't coming over anyway. They were going to Phoenix for their shopping. And ah, it was not a very popular issue to build the Sunnyslope High School. But the people in Glendale approved it, as did the people in the district.
DS: Well Sunnyslope was in Phoenix then wasn't it?
RA: Yeah, it was in the city, it was in the city limits of Phoenix, yes.
DS: Was then.
RA: It was then too, well, not, I think it was.
DS: Well that's a long way from Glendale High School. I drove it just the other day, and its ah
RA: Nine miles.
DS: Is it nine miles?
RA: About nine miles, approximately.
DS: That's quite a ways for two schools in the same district isn't it?
RA: Well, yes. Quite a ways, quite a ways to transport those kids. We had quite a number of buses running over there transporting those students.
DS: And some came from east of Sunnyslope High, so they went even further.
RA: Yes. But Sunnyslope, ah, our district boundaries went as far as, I think it's 16th Street on the east side.
DS: Yeah, see, that's quite a way east.
RA: Yes. And of course they went out north to Bell Road, so there's a lot of area there where the race track is now. That was developed, it was developed before I went to Glendale, just about that time. But ah, we figured that by building the high school in Sunnyslope we could cut down on some of the transportation problems with transporting students. But when we got ready to go with the high school in the Washington area, the people in the district voted against it. Voted it down, not a great, not a fantastic margin, but it was voted down rather decisively. The people in the Washington area blamed themselves because they didn't really get their group out to vote. And they wanted the board to call an election for another chance to build the Washington High School. The board said, "Look, we have called one election. We did what we thought was right; the people said no. We don't feel that we should put the pressure on them again." And so the people in the Washington area got a petition out and petitioned for an election. And they proposed the terms of the election in the same, using the same wording that the board had proposed, and of course the board had no alternative but to, they had to accept it, call the election. Call for an election. Well in that election the board did not go out and actively support the bond issue. They were not opposed to it, they were in favor of it, but because it was voted down the first time they just didn't feel like it was proper for them to go out and push it.
DS: When was that first election?
RA: Well, it must have been about 195...it was probably 1954.
DS: I have a record of it so I can check.
RA: Yeah, you probably have a record of it. It was not many months later that the people of the district petitioned for another election, and that had to be held in a specified time, and of course advertised and all that. But the people in the Washington area were the ones that were really pushing it. And they set up what they called "coffee clutches." And they asked, they got their parents together of the students, and they elected their own leaders, I don't even remember who the leaders were. But they elected their leaders, and they asked their parents to, or couples to invite four or five of their neighbors in to talk about the bond issue. And they put out a one page fact sheet. They just called it FACTS. And they decided they would not ask these people to vote for the bond issue, but they would merely bring them together and explain the facts about the growth of the district and the inadequate housing and ask them to, they asked each of them within a matter of three to five days to have a "coffee clutch" in their own home and invite other people who hadn't been invited yet. And this thing spread, not just in the Washington area, but spread into Glendale. I remember Dr. Wright, a dentist, his wife was rather active in some of the circles, and they invited some people in in the Glendale area to have coffee at their house. And later he said, "You know, I didn't realize that this thing was so unpopular." he said. "I don't think of anybody that came to that meeting that acted to me like they were going to vote for that." We said, "We didn't ask them to vote for it, but we didn't ask for them to vote against it either."
DS: Why were they against it?
RA: Well, same reason, they anticipated that it would increase their taxes. And of course some people just didn't believe that Glendale was growing like it was. They just couldn't believe that. And they though we were joking when we said we'd have to go on double sessions. Well before we got finished with the high school built, we had to go on double sessions. We actually started classes as early as six o'clock in the morning, and we had some students coming between six and twelve; we had all the sophomores, now all the juniors and seniors were scheduled for morning classes. All the freshmen were scheduled for afternoon classes, and the sophomores, we divided them, so that half of them came in the morning and half in the afternoon. And the reason was that we needed ten classes of biology and we had only one classroom. So we had two teachers teaching biology; one of them in the morning and one in the afternoon. Each with a full load. But we had only one classroom. And so we were really crowded that year. But really, it was a good year. The teachers that taught in the morning, they liked that cause they had all afternoon free. Those who were late risers, they liked that afternoon session. And so, some teachers had to teach both morning and afternoon.
DS: Both were held at the Glendale High School.
RA: That was at Glendale High School.
DS: That was before you got Sunnyslope finished.
RA: That was before we had, before we were able to move into Sunnyslope.
DS: Now let me ask you an obvious question. Why was the Glendale District so large in the first place? It extended from east Phoenix clear to the west Valley.
RA: You have to remember that the Glendale Union High School District I think, was organized in 19, I believe it was 1912, I may be wrong on that date. It would be in the history.
DS: I have that too. The school
RA: Maybe 1910
DS: 1910, because the school was finished in 1912.
RA: Okay, 1910 was when they had the election. And I believe the man who they employed to start with was B. H. Scudder, who later moved to Tempe. And B. H. Scudder was also superintendent up in Jerome when they built Jerome High School...and he had three daughters, three daughters, and all of them were teachers. And B. H. Scudder was a, he was sort of a trader, a horse trader. And while he was in Glendale, I think Van Camp told me some of the stories about B. H. Scudder. Said if somebody had a horse they wanted to trade they'd call him. He was apt to leave the school to go take a look at the horse. He'd trade horses and cattle and anything else. He was sort of an entrepreneur.
DS: But you started to tell me why it was so large.
RA: Why was the district so large.
DS: Going clear to north Phoenix.
RA: Going back to 1910, the students who were, the young people of high school age living in the Peoria and Glendale area all had to go to Phoenix to high school. It was the only high school in the Valley. And so it was decided that they should organize a school closer to them.
DS: Even Buckeye, I know ah, Charlie Mitten tells about going into Phoenix Union, his kids.
RA: Yeah, there were a lot of them like that. And I don't know exactly, I wasn't there during that organizational period, that was before my time, but ah, Glendale was just a small community. There was no Sunnyslope at that time. Nothing at all. There was no community called Washington. There was an agricultural area out there, practically all farms, but no community. No density of population at all. And the schools would just, they would just draw lines as to where they thought it might be and they'd have the election and the election specified the boundaries. And they'd just decide that was a good boundary area. They included both the Washington elementary and the Glendale elementary districts. So the boundaries really encompassed both of those districts.
DS: I know, that's where the kids came from at the high school, out of Washington.
RA: Yes.
DS: And Alhambra.
RA: Well, Alhambra, Alhambra was not in the Glendale district. It was a part of the Phoenix Union High School District. But a lot of the kids continued to come to Glendale from the Alhambra area.
DS: That's right, I remember that.
RA: Yes. In fact, ah, while I was there, the Phoenix Union High School was growing too. And Dr. Montgomery thought the only way to solve their problem was to make all these Sunnyslope kids and the kids from the Washington area who were going to Phoenix, make them go to their own school. And so they adopted a policy not allowing any student outside their district to come into their school unless they paid tuition. Well when they did that, we felt in order to save our own necks so to speak, that we were growing too, we, the board had to adopt the same kind of policy. And when we did that, it meant that a lot of kids living just south of Glendale, as few as two and three miles south of Glendale, who were in the Pendergast District, and they were coming to Glendale High School. They could even catch one of the buses and come in. But when they had to go to a Phoenix High School, some of those kids had to walk into Glendale, catch a city bus, and be transported into Phoenix, make a transfer in order to get on another bus to get out to the school they were attending. So when the district boundaries were drawn back in, well the Washington Elementary District was organized I think probably in the 1880s sometime, and the Glendale Elementary District, Glendale is District #40...
DS: Glendale was 40, I remember that.
RA: Glendale was #40?
DS: I don't know why, but
RA: Well it's the fortieth elementary district that was organized in Maricopa County.
DS: ...that's a big, a big number.
RA: Well you see, the Peoria District is #11. They organized the elementary district in Peoria before they did the Glendale District.
DS: Well Peoria's older than Glendale.
RA: Yeah. And so the numbers go with the sequence of the organization. So when they organized the Glendale Union High School District, and this was a piece of legislation they got from California. California had unionized school districts. And unionized school districts don't appear in more than about twelve or fourteen states. In most of the states they have the school system in grades K through 12. Just one budget and so forth. Whereas in Arizona at that time, even when I went to Glendale in 1946, ah, you had a high school, you had a union high school board, you had an elementary school board. Both of them entirely separate. A person on one board could not serve on the other by law. So that, and then there were a lot of schools like Peoria, they had the Peoria Elementary District and Peoria High School District, the board of, the board of trustees for the elementary district constituted the board of education of the high school district. And essentially we were supposed to keep two sets of minutes, one for the elementary district when the trustees met, and one for the high school district when the board of education met. Had to have two different budgets, and had to, had to keep your accounts separate and everything. So you charge...when you bought gasoline you paid for part of it with the elementary issued funds and part with the high school district funds. Had two different taxes. Had a tax rate for the elementary district and one for the high school district. I know that there's quite a few people in the Glendale area that thought the Union High School District were paying our teachers too much. We had too high of salaries. They thought that we ought to do something to control the salaries. But high school salaries were so low that we couldn't prevent teachers from going to Phoenix. We lost a lot of good teachers. And Phoenix had a policy when I went there, or shortly after I went there. They would not employ a person unless they had a degree and unless they had at least one year teaching experience in another school. So the teachers, the people that graduated from Tempe couldn't go into the Phoenix Union High School District unless they went out somewhere else and taught for one year and then they could apply in Phoenix.
DS: By a degree, do you mean a Bachelor's Degree?
RA: Well, a Bachelor's Degree, yes.
DS: They've even starting requiring Master's...
RA: Yes, Phoenix Union High School started requiring Master's about that time. They required a Master's Degree and one year of teaching. And so we lost a lot of good teachers. We lost...like Al Davis, we lost Steve ..., we lost what was their track coach's name? Do you remember, ah, I can't remember his name now. He was one of the that kidded Barbara about the freckles on her face. I can't remember his name (background whisper), Stengland, Jim Stengland.
DS: Oh, Jim Stengland. I remember him when he was in college. Great pole vaulter.
RA: Yeah. We lost a lot of good teachers. Well, we lost young Vernon...and ah
DS: Did he teach at Glendale first?
RA: Yeah, he taught at Glendale first then he went into Phoenix. They offered him more money. They always offered $400 or $500 a year more than Glendale.
DS: I'll tell you something else. Before that, ASU or ASTC lost a lot of faculty because paid them more too.
RA: Yes, yes, some of the people teaching at the college in Tempe were offered contracts over at Phoenix Union District. They went over there to teach.
DS: They were notoriously low-paid in Tempe.
RA: Well during the Depression they, the Tempe salaries I think, they cut the full professors back to $1,600 a year...Burkhart, Grimes...some of those people, yeah, cut them way back. ...actually when we opened the Sunnyslope High School we intended to start, we proposed we start with a two-year high school, freshmen and sophomores, because ...take care of the juniors and seniors over in Glendale. However, once it became known that we were going to have a high school there, a lot of the juniors and seniors asked that we go ahead and offer a full high school program. They wanted to go to Sunnyslope High. They wanted to stay near home to go to school. And so we started out with a four year high school. About half the seniors continued on at Glendale. The other half transferred to Sunnyslope. And we had juniors, I think there were a little more than half of them started in Sunnyslope when we first started. So we started out as a four year high school.
DS: Let me ask you something. Your title was Superintendent or Principal?
RA: Well, it was essentially, I was really a Superintendent and a Principal, essentially.
DS: That confused me because superintendents are usually over more than one school.
RA: Yes, ordinarily they do. However, it depends on your definition of superintendent. The superintendent is usually the chief executive officer of a school district, and a principal is usually the head educational leader in a school. Well if you've only got one school, you're both, you could be both see.
DS: What was your title on your contract?
RA: Well, I don't, on the contract I think it was Superintendent. But I've not, I don't remember for sure. In fact, many of those years that I was there I didn't even have a contract. Cause I never, I never did believe in more than a one-year contract. When I told the board that I was going to go to Tempe in 1955, they offered me a four-year contract. Well, they'd offered me a longer term contract a time or two before and I'd refused it in every case. But I told them that I'd prefer not to have more than a one-year contract. If they wouldn't want me, then I sure...
DS: That's unusual...
RA: No, I never, in fact some years went by that they didn't even set my salary until they had to make payroll up in July. Finally at the board meeting in July I'd say, "Look, we gotta send the payroll in before the 15th, what are you going to pay me this year?" So they'd just tell me what the salary was. I didn't even have a formal contract for many years I was there. (whispering) Well, they paid me, I was one of the higher paid administrators in the state. I was probably fifth or sixth highest paid. E. W. Montgomery was the highest paid, then the superintendent down in Tucson, Bob Morrow had a good salary, and Charlie Carson, his assistant had a good salary. And then Harvey Taylor over in Mesa had a pretty good salary, but I was about the fifth or sixth highest. I never received a salary of more than $10,000 a year while I was there. Fact I went there at $4,500.
DS: That was a lot of money then.
RA: Yeah, it was. I started out as Superintendent in Peoria at $3,600, second year they gave me $3,600. And I made $4,200 the third year I believe. I don't remember.
DS: ...Peoria High before as superintendent?
RA: I went to Peoria in 1940, and I could not become the principal because I didn't have my Master's Degree, and I had just started working on my Master's Degree at Arizona State at that time. So they called me up. I started...Mr. Jansen...well I don't think they called me a counselor, they called me something else, I don't remember what it was, it was a coordinator I believe. I believe they used the word coordinator. And when I first went to Peoria High School I taught one or two classes. But essentially I did the work of a high school principal. I did all of the scheduling and I interviewed the teachers and I took care of everything that a high school principal would do.
DS: Was...there at that time?
RA: ...Jansen was there. When I went there he was 70 years old. And ah, he told me that he had tried to resign but the board didn't want him to. And he didn't know what to do, and so he stayed on. But ah, the year before I went there, the kids had gotten out of control. He was serving as a superintendent and a high school principal and the elementary school principal. He was serving as all of them. And when finally the year that he finally told me, he said, "I'm gonna retire this year. I'm not gonna let them talk me out of it." And he said, "I think they'll probably want to put you in as superintendent." I'd been there three years. And when he, he asked me to go to the board meeting with him, I did. And when he handed in his resignation, three board members read it and they laid it on the table and none of them said a word to each other. They didn't act on it, they didn't do anything about it. And the next day he said, he said, "What do you make, what do you make of that?" he said. "Are they going to accept my resignation or what, or what?" I said, "I don't know. I don't know." He said, "I'd sure like to know." He said, "I, I think it's time I retire." And I know, I was a very good friend of Pat Coor by that time, he and I were playing golf on Sundays. And Pat said, Pat asked me, he said, "Does Mr. Jansen want to retire?" He said, "We have never been sure that he really wanted to." And he said, "He's done so much good for our district that we don't want to let him go unless he really wants to." I said, "Well, he tells me he wants to. And he tells me that he's disappointed that you people won't accept his resignation." Well then, we worked it out that we would, his salary, his salary...I think they were paying him $3,600 a year.
DS: His last year.
RA: Yeah, $3,600. And they didn't think they ought to pay me as much as they paid him because he'd been there a long time. I didn't ask for a salary, I'd never asked for a salary rate anyway. In fact, when I went there Mr. Jansen asked me what it would take to get me to come to Peoria. I was teaching down in Yuma. And the reason, the reason I got hired ...up to Peoria is to fill in the last six weeks in home economics because Leslie, did you know Leslie Wilcox? She married, what was his name, married, I don't know, well anyway, she was pregnant and she had to take time off to have a baby. And she...and ah, Mr. Jansen asked Mrs...Eva Sculley where he could get a teacher for the last six weeks. And so actually Mr. Jansen contacted...We were running short on money. I was trying to build my house in Yuma, I built it myself, and we only borrowed $2,000 and we were running a little short on money. And I needed to go to summer school, I wanted to go to summer school. I'd gone to one session back at the State University in Iowa, but I took graduate work in chemistry. I wanted to start at Tempe, work on my Master's Degree in Educational Administration. And so Mr. Jansen called her and talked to her and she went up for an interview and he hired her for the last six weeks. And I'd never met Mr. Jansen until the last day of school, I went up to help her, actually we had our graduation in Yuma on Thursday night and Peoria was having theirs on Friday night. So I went up and I helped her carry the punch out of the basement and they had cookies and punch that they, after graduation exercise they set up tables outside and had cookies and punch and everybody who went to the ceremony would stand around and talk and drink punch and eat cookies. And I met Mr. Jansen in that atmosphere, and we chatted a little bit, nothing much said, we just visited. Helen went back Saturday morning to turn in her keys, Mr. Jansen asked her if she thought I'd be at all interested in a job. And she said, "No, I don't think so, but his salary is quite a bit more than teachers in Peoria are getting, so I don't think he would be." And she passed it off at that. And he said, "Well, if he is interested in a job, I'd like to talk to him." And she came home, she didn't say anything to me until the middle of next week, about Wednesday of next week. She remembered, we were in the process of trying to move, we built a house...moving over there. So about the middle of the week she said, "Oh, by the way, Mr. Jansen asked me if there was any chance that you might be interested in a job. I told him I didn't think you would be." I said, "Well what did he say? What kind of job was it?" Well, she didn't know. So I called Mr. Jansen and I went over on Saturday morning and had a long talk with him. And ah, he still acted like he wanted me, but, although I couldn't understand why. But he wanted me to go talk to board members, and the board members were, one of them was a barber and two of them were farmers. I went down and talked to the barber, he was communcative, he was very friendly, but didn't ask many questions or anything else. I felt rather embarrassed going down and saying, "Mr. Jansen asked me to come down and talk to you." But that was the thing. I said, "He wants to consider me for a job or something." So I talked to the farmer while he was on a tractor. He shut his tractor off and we sat there and talked for a few minutes. And I talked to the other one, he was milking a cow. So my first...was I didn't know whether I really wanted the job or not. And then after he talked to the board, they offered me the job, then he wanted to know what it would take to get me to come in the way of salary. I said, "Well, I was going to be getting, I think $1,600 or $1,650 out of Yuma." I said, "I didn't think I could think about moving for less than that." And I figured that, I knew they were only paying the teachers $1,200. And I said to him, I said, "Well, I don't think I could move for less than $1,900." Well, he didn't say anything, but he called me back in about a week and said, "Well, we'll offer you the job at $1,900." The reason I'm telling you this is at the end...
DS: Yeah, I need to get onto the Glendale...
RA: Yeah, at the end of the first year I began to try to get Mr. Jansen and ah, to get the board to increase the salaries of the teachers. And I surely thought it would cost in terms of tax rate and this, that, and the other, didn't amount to much. And so we did, and the board increased the teachers' salaries from $1,200 to $1,400. Gave them all a $200 raise. Which was pretty good. And then he came around to me about a month later, and he said, "The board wants to, the board has done a very nice thing for you. They've increased your salary to $2,000 for next year." So I got, I got a $100 raise and the teachers got a $200 raise, and I didn't say a word. I figured well, they wanted me. And I was happy, I was learning. I learned a lot that first year. (whispering)
DS: Yeah, we need to go onto Glendale.
RA: We need to get over to Glendale.
DS: Yeah.
RA: Well, after I'd been in Peoria for six years, the Glendale job opened up.
DS: Mr... had some difficulty about that time.
RA: Actually,...
DS: He had been there ah,
RA: He'd been there since 1931.
DS: Since 1930.
RA: 1930. He'd been there 16 years. His main, actually, well I think he had problems all the time he was there.
DS: Yes he did. There was always somebody trying to get him fired.
DS: Alway something. But the thing that really teed, teed off the board, so I was told later, he, someway or other, they blamed him for letting Mutt Ford get away from them and going over to Mesa to coach. That was the thing that really upset. And the day, and the night that they were to consider extending his salary, giving him another long-term contract, he excused himself from the board meeting and went down to the library. And he stayed down there about an hour, and finally he couldn't figure out why these guys didn't come and call him back into the meeting. And finally, he, Mr...went back up to the meeting and rapped on the door and went in, and ah, he said, "Well, have you made up your mind as to what you're going to do in the way of my contract?" And all this time they hadn't been talking about his contact at all. They'd been talking about football and other things. They were more concerned about losing their coach and this, that, and the other. And they really hadn't talked about his contract.
DS: Now Ford had, had succeeded Crouch then?
RA: Yeah, Crouch had gone into the military see.
DS: ...came in there too, didn't he?
RA: ...came in, but I think...came in...was in the military too. He came in after the war. Of course Crouch came back the year that I went there. Crouch had just come out of the service. So he came back on the job. But ah, so, and Crouch did not want to go back into coaching. Ah, and this was one of the things, the board wanted Crouch to go back into coaching. But he had already told Mr... that he would not coach football. He did not want to coach football. And so they spent all that time just talking about football and this, that, and the other and never got around to his contract. But someway or other Mr...got the idea that because they didn't do anything that they were getting to fire him. And he called, I think he called the faculty the next morning, and he told his teachers that he'd been fired, hoping to generate some response on the part of the teachers to come to his rescue. And his wife was a librarian, and she got word out to the students so I was told. And the board never told me this, one of the women there told me this, that some of the students came in with a petition signed by two or three hundred students asking them not to fire him, to keep him. Another group of students came in with about an equal number of signatures that said go ahead and fire him. And, and the teachers ah, there were very few of them, there were a few of them, but ah sort of generated some, but most of them did not want to take any part in it. And actually, he fired himself. And this kind of upset the board when they got these petitions and things, and so they said, "Well, maybe the best thing..." I didn't apply for the job. The thing that happened was that Ray...came out to see me. And I think two or three people had talked, well, yeah, Ray was the first one that came out. And ah, he came out to talk to me one day at Peoria High School. We chatted for quite some time. He said, "Well, I wish you'd put in an application." I said, "Well, I'm not sure if I want to apply. I just don't know what the conditions are down there." And I knew they'd been having some problems.
DS: But they were on the verge of this big growth you knew.
RA: Yeah, I knew that, yeah.
DS: It's gotta be a big job.
RA: Yeah, and so, Ray went back and I think the next day he brought Sam Joy out to visit with me. And then in the later part of the week he brought ah (wife talking in background). I've forgotten the details. Carl...Carl was more interested in running the financial part of running the district. I think he wanted to know whether, he wanted to assure himself that I knew something about school finance and so forth.
DS: Did you have your Master's by that time?
RA: Yeah I had my Master's. I got my Master's in ah, hmm forty, 1942. (wife said he'd started his Doctorate by then) I didn't start the Doctorate...until I went to Glendale. That was the first year that I went to Glendale. I went over to USC just for the four-week session I think...
DS: Is that where you got your ah,
RA: Doctorate at USC.
DS: Did you get a EDD or PHD?
RA: Yeah, EDD.
DS: At USC.
RA: Yeah, 19, I got that in '53. The reason I remember this, seven come eleven. I got my Master's Degree seven years after I got my Bacalaureate, and I got my Doctorate eleven years after I got my Master's. Seven come eleven.
DS: Well tell me something about the conditions in Glendale. Now you'd been gone fifteen years...
RA: I left Glendale in 1931, and went to school at Flagstaff.
DS: Had it changed a lot in that length of time?
RA: In that period of time?
DS: Between '31 and '45, or '46?
RA: No, it hadn't really. It hadn't changed a lot.
DS: No, I wouldn't think it would, but after that it really started didn't it?
RA: Even the high school. I don't remember how many students there were in high school when I was there, but I think there were about 56 or 60 in our graduating class. And ordinarily you would multiply that by six and you'd get the high school enrollment. So six times 60 would be 360. There were probably 350 - 400 kids in the high school when I was there.
DS: And we had 90 in our class. 1940, so you see, it hadn't grown that much.
RA: No, then in 1946, when I went back, I think they only had around 650 or so.
DS: So it just grew slowly.
RA: Slow growth.
DS: Now you started to tell me who was running things. That was one of the first things you mentioned there.
RA: Well, actually, running things at the school?
DS: No, in the town.
RA: In the town. In the town, I think that the one man that I think had more respect overall than almost anybody was Harry Bonsall, Sr.
DS: Yeah, that's what everybody says.
RA: I think he had, and he didn't ah, push himself. He didn't...
DS: He didn't run for office.
RA: No, he didn't want to.
DS: Never wanted to be mayor.
RA: But he was always, but he was glad to have one of his employees, ah, Bill Barkley, serve as mayor. And in the legislature. But I don't think he expected Bill to give him any special treatment at all. I don't think he expected that. He was just a man that, he had a tremendous rapport with his staff down at his organization.
DS: What did Barkley do for Bonsall at Southwest?
RA: He ran the ah Union Oil...for Southwest Oil. He was a union oil man.
DS: Yeah, I though of him as in oil. So he wasn't in the mill at all?
RA: No, he was in Union Oil. They had their, they were separate and apart, they were...
DS: I knew Bill well. He was very, he became Speaker of the House. Now who else besides Bonsall?
RA: I, now, in other areas, I think another man was Frank Carter. I think he had a lot of ah, a lot of rapport.
DS: Was he a JP then?
RA: Yes.
DS: And he had run a men's clothing store when I was in school.
RA: Yes, he had a men's clothing store, before that he worked, he worked on the school, he was a school custodian.
DS: Is that right.
RA: Well maybe it was, I don't know whether it was before or after he run the men's clothing store, but he was, and I remember...Frank Carter was coming to work in the morning, dressed up like he was the superintendent. He took off his good clothes and put on his work clothes and go to work. Then after work that day he'd take a shower and dress up again and go home. But Frank was a good worker. But I think Frank had a real understanding for people, for down and out people. I think he had a real feel for those people. He'd had some tough going in his younger days. And I think a lot of people respected him, respected Frank a great deal. So in terms of, now you see he had certain influence in areas entirely separate than Harry Bonsall did. Harry had influence in terms of Chamber of Commerce...
DS: Rotary,
RA: Rotary,...Well I think another, if you think about it...
DS: Billy...
RA: ...Billy Jack. He was down at the University of Arizona.
DS: He came after I left I guess. Though his family was very instrumental in Glendale from before the turn of the century.
RA: He's not of that same family.
DS: He's not of that same family? Oh, I thought he was.
RA: No, he's not of that family.
DS: Oh, well I'm glad you straightened me out on that. Okay.
RA: No, he was not related to Lenny Jack, no. Now Lenny Jack, she was, in terms of women in the community...
DS: Yeah, she was the power. She started the Women's Club.
RA: Well, she was a, she was it. Yeah. Lenny Jack, she was something. Betty Lou was her daughter. And she had another daughter, what was the other one's name? I've forgotten, but anyway. Francis Jack, yeah. I think there may have been a boy or two in that family, there was, but I don't remember what their names were, but Bill was not that.
DS: Unusual that, I never knew anybody else with that name.
RA: Yeah. But Bill, I think, Bill, another man with quite a bit of influence and integrity...But obviously Harry Bonsall probably was number one, and I'd say Frank Carter was...and I think Harold Smith had quite a bit of rapport...particularly as related to school and education.
DS: Now Bill Ryan didn't hold the position that some editors did in town...
RA: No, Bill Ryan...
DS: Wonder why.
RA: Bill Ryan, well...
DS: Well, he drank too much.
RA: Well, yeah.
DS: I worked for Bill at that time.
RA: Yeah, you did, that's right.
DS: Forty-seven. Mm-hmm.
RA: Bill, you, ah, I had trouble sometimes trying to figure out whether he meant what he said a lot of times. At times I think Bill would say one thing but he was thinking something else. I don't know. Leah Cox was a...
DS: You think she had more power than Bill?
RA: Oh yeah, oh yes, yeah. Yeah, I don't think Bill had, huh I do, I guess you know you have little things that tip you off to certain things. Bill called me about just about the time school one day,...he said, "I haven't received any order yet for mimeograph paper." And ah, I said, "Do you sell mimeograph paper?" He said, "Yeah." I said, "Well, I didn't know that." He said, "I've been selling it to the school for years." I said, "How much a ream do..." I said, "What do you ask for your mimeograph paper?" "A dollar for a ream." "A dollar for a ream?" I said, "I've got some estimates from the school supply house in Phoenix and I can get it there for 83 cents a ream." And then he kind of blew up. He said, "Well," he said, "we're the taxpayers out here. We're paying to run that school and we think we ought to be entitled to its business." I said, "Well, in a competitive basis, your price is right, I'd would be more than happy to give you..." But I said, "You're not quoting a price that I can go to the board and tell them that that's where we should spend the taxpayers' money." And I think I got off on the wrong foot with Bill.
DS: He sold ah, he had the stationery store. We used to have to work in there after we got through with the newspaper.
RA: ...but I didn't realize that he'd been selling these school supplies. And I'd gotten ah, some quotations from PBSW, O. B. Marston, and maybe...supply or something. And so I think I made Bill mad. I didn't realize. I wouldn't have bought it from him anyway, but ah, if I would have known it sooner I would have given him a chance to bid. I didn't even send him a bid form. I didn't know that he supplied, really. And so Bill, Bill and I never did have the best relationship.
DS: Now Rennick was mayor just before you got there.
RA: I think so.
DS: He left in '45 I believe.
RA: As mayor?
DS: Yeah.
RA: I went there in '46. That'd be about right. And when I went there Mr. Rennick was about ready to retire. He was, Mr.Yelman said he'd already retired, but he hadn't. He was still on the payroll. And he was, he...But he wasn't really interested in teaching. He told me, he said, "As you grow older, your interests change." He said, "I've gotten to the point where I really don't get excited working with kids anymore." He said, "I'd much rather work with adults." And he wanted the business manager's job. And essentially, I think ah, the first year I was there, the second year I was there, I kind of moved him into that business manager's. I think maybe the first year. I lightened his class load and in fact I think he only taught one or two classes and then he was going to do the business for me. Take care of all the purchasing and this, that, and the other.
DS: Who was taking care of that before, the principal?
RA: Ah, well I think Mr. Yelman took care of it. Took care of all that.
DS: Amazing what the principals had to do in those days.
RA: Well, he...in other words he gave the business to Bill Ryan and gave...I made quite a few enemies right after, Mutt, I'd always...and the Whitney family. But Mutt had the school at Firestone and he had the Wilson Sporting Goods...(wife reminding him that this was going on tape) Well, I won't get into too many things. But anyway, Mutt was a good man. But Mutt had a little bit of the same opinion that Bill Ryan did. That inasmuch as he had a sporting goods store, he should get the sporting goods business. And my theory was that you should spend the taxpayers' money and get the greatest benefits you can from the dollars that you collect.
DS: Well, of course you were right. But they ah, there was a provincial attitude to shop in Glendale. I remember those big ads about "Shop In Glendale." Keep anybody from going to town.
RA: Yeah that's why, in fact that was just sort of a, a feeling that you should shop in Glendale. Well, I always wanted to shop in Glendale and I wanted to shop in Prescott too.
DS: Who were the organization that were the big, most important? Rotary I suppose, and Chamber?
RA: Chamber of Commerce became fairly good.
DS: Pardon me.
RA: Chamber of Commerce became a good organization after we employed an executive secretary. We employed a fellow by the name of Fred, I can't remember his name, but you've it there. But he was brought on a part-time basis. He never had any Chamber experience. But he'd...back in the Midwest or East somewhere. And ah, he came in on a part-time basis. But he was working full time. And he increased the membership so much, and the dues came in, we had, the Chamber had enough money that they put him on a full-time basis.
DS: About what year was that?
RA: Well, this must have been around '48, '49, somewhere in there. But they, but Fred had some health problems. That was one of the reasons he was in Arizona. He'd worked too hard back where he was. And he became, I guess it...still in Glendale, still there before '55. He'd had some real problems with his legs. Veins were giving out on him and ah, I think eventually he had one leg amputated. And ah, when he got ill, whoever was running, pretty much the power in the Chamber at that time decided they needed to get a full-time man. And so they let Fred go and they got somebody else...
DS: Who was mayor after Rennick? I have that record too, but I just wanted to know what you remembered about him?
RA: I don't remember who the mayor was.
DS: You know they shifted to the City Manager form of government in 1947...Bud Balkman. Remember him?
RA: Forty-seven, Bud Balkman.
DS: He was the first City Manager.
RA: The first City Manager.
DS: I remember that because he came in just before I got there. The Glendale News. And they paved all the streets just about that time, remember that?
RA: Yeah, yeah.
DS: Do you remember when they paved all the streets at one time? Every street that hadn't been paved was paved. And this was a national, in fact I wrote a national story for Public Works Magazine about it. That really tore up the town.
RA: ...Balkman, but he wasn't City Manager more than two or three years, was he?
DS: Not very long.
RA: And I don't remember who took over, but Stan Vanderpugh took over initially.
DS: Yeah, he came up as a policeman and then Police Chief.
RA: Yeah, that's right.
DS: Vanderpugh I think ranks as the outstanding City Manager in the history of the town. That was after you left.
RA: Yeah, he was a good Chief of Police, too. Now he was Chief of Police while I was there. And he was a good man.
DS: Now Chris Sheets, have you been ah chief...
RA: Chris Sheets ah...
DS: He was chief when I was in school.
RA: Oh, was he?
DS: Yeah.
RA: Chief of Police?
DS: His daughter, Barbara, was very...
RA: Well he wasn't on the police force while I was there.
DS: Is that right. He'd been fired once, and then was brought back. Remember Dick Witter came on as a judge.
RA: Yeah, he was a judge, Dick Witter came on about the time, well, I think when Frank Harden went in as JP, Dick Witter came in as City Manager didn't he?
DS: Mm-hmm, that's right.
RA: About that time.
DS: Yeah. I talked to him and to Irene Witter, his wife. Who were both with the city for many years, and then ah, Bernice Lucas Grog, remember her?
RA: Yeah, Bernice Lucas, I remember and then she married somebody.
DS: She was city clerk for many years.
RA: Yeah, she was ah, she ran the place there for a long time.
DS: That's right. Uh-huh.
RA: She was very good.
DS: Now who were the mayors you remember the most while you were there?
RA: Huh, I don't remember any of them. Barkley was.
DS: Yeah, Bill was.
RA: He was mayor several years. Ah, I remember...
DS: Who was the legislator from that area?
RA: Ahh,
DS: Glendale has never had any ah, a Congressman or a Governor well, technically. Ha, ha, ha.
RA: ...one gentlemen who was in the automobile business that became Governor.
DS: Well, strange, Glendale people don't think he had much to do with Glendale politics or operation.
RA: Naw, he didn't. I don't think he had much to do with anything, really...
DS: He didn't live in Glendale I don't think, did he?
RA: No. Ah, I'm looking down through the list here at some of the people that...Al...
DS: I talked to Al not long ago, he's still around.
RA: Is he still, is he still with the pharmecutical?
DS: No, he's retired.
RA: He's retired.
DS: He was with the State office.
RA: I saw him somewhere not too long ago and had a nice little visit with him.
DS: I want to ask you about black students at Glendale High. Now when I was at Glendale High there were no black students. They all had to go into Phoenix Colored School, which later became Carver. Now, was that a law or rule or just a custom?
RA: Well, let's put it this way. The state law was enacted requiring that elementary schools have a separate educational program for black students. That was mandatory at the elementary level. At the high school level, if there were a sufficient number of black students to constitute a school, the board could, but didn't have to, could have a separate school, and that's when Phoenix organized the Carver High School. And then of course we got this segragation problem come along following, well actually this thing began to come to a head during World War II when Roosevelt mandated that the black soldiers be given the same rights as the white soldiers. And ah, Harry Truman followed along with the same philosophy. And then it wasn't until we had the Brown vs. the Board of Education in Topeka, Kansas...
DS: 1954.
RA: Fifty-two or fifty-four? Ah that it became mandatory that we do away with segregated schools.
This is a continuation of our interview with Dr. Robert Ashe. We were speaking about black students.
RA: When I was in, first year I became Superintendent in Peoria, 1943, I had some black parents that came to me and wanted to have a place for their kids to be in school. And ah, there were only about three or four children involved, and we thought we'd accommodate them in the public schools right there in Peoria. However, within the next few days, I had a request from the Dysart School District. They said they had several black families that had moved out there to pick cotton, and they wanted to know if there wasn't some way we could put all of these black children together and put them in a school. We had a vacant schoolhouse out in Marionette, which was where they built that motel out in Sun City, that's where it stood. We had a brick building. Didn't have modern accommodations, had an outhouse, two outhouses. We had to haul water, we didn't have a well, we had to haul water for it, but anyway, here we were going to swamped with ah, we only had a few kids, but they had quite a number and they didn't have a room for them. They didn't have any space for them. And so we decided to put them all together and hire a teacher and have a one-room school for the black children. We didn't have any high school close. And so...
DS: Said state law mandated separate schools for elementary.
RA: For elementary, even at that time see. Ah, so we went ahead and I interviewed teachers. I had several...I won't go into that. But we had a, hired a teacher and had about 16 or 18 students out there, most of them were from the Dysart District. We had some from Peoria too. We operated that school for two years. We had so much trouble, the teacher had problems. The first year she was single, she had a car and it would break down. I'd get a phone call in the morning saying, "My car broke down, I can't get to school." And we'd have to get somebody out there to open that school. In fact I went out there an opened the school, started school several days. And so we decided, we had so many problems, we just decided we'd do away with that school at the end of the second year. And a lot of the students who were in the Dysart area moved away. So there weren't as many. And I told the families of the kids in our school, I said, "Put them on the school bus; send them right on into school. We'll take care of them." And we integrated them in the Peoria schools in 1945.
DS: Against the law then, huh?
RA: Against the law, but we didn't care. I mean, we just knew it was right. Well it so happens that when I went to Glendale, about the second or third year I was there, these families moved to Glendale. Now the kids were in high school. There were two brothers. They were, they were nice boys. And they came and wanted to go to high school, and we just signed them up. Said nothing to anybody about it, just signed them up. I didn't even consult the board on it. Just went ahead and enrolled them. And we never had any problems at all with those two. And eventually, I presume, there've been more since then, but I don't know. Cause Glendale didn't have many minorities except for the Spanish-American, they had a lot of them. But then, of course, when the law, desegragation...Phoenix Union High School did away with the Carver High School, and then they put all of those, they divided those teachers among all of the other schools. But that went over real good because they had a group of excellent teachers. They...
DS: They were good, yeah.
RA: They had a man named Robinson.
DS: Robinson, mm-hmm.
RA: Who would go back in the South and he would witness teachers teaching, and he picked out the good teachers and offered them a job. He could offer them more money than anybody in the South was offering. So he could get the choice, the pick of the lot. So those teachers who went into the Phoenix high schools then were well accepted as far as I know.
DS: They were dismayed at the time they decided to integrate cause they weren't sure they could get a job anymore.
RA: Yeah. But it was agreed that they would keep them, and ah, in fact I think there was some apprehension...Dr. Montgomery wasn't sure that, I'm not sure that he really like the idea of integrating them, but on the other hand, he decided that they had to do it. And Dr. Montgomery was getting old then. He was getting to where they wanted him to retire, but he didn't want to retire. Finally they, they set the date for him to retire. And then they had, they had a lot of turnover since then. See Mr. Jansen was Superintendent in Phoenix before Dr. Montgomery came.
DS: Oh yes, I remember that. He was Superintendent when Reg Manning was at school and they had that big fear about the yearbook. I don't know if you knew about that or not.
RA: Barry Goldwater was one, was a pupil there at Phoenix Union High School.
DS: Well Jansen asked Barry Goldwater to leave school and go somewhere else. Yes he did. That's why he went to military school.
RA: Yeah. Well anyway, as far as the black population was concerned, there wasn't many black people in the Glendale area. There, these families lived down south of the ice plant somewhere. I don't remember where they lived. I never did know where they lived.
DS: Mexicans were all grouped in one area down in the...
RA: Pretty much, southeast part of town.
DS: The Russians were out west.
RA: Russians were out west.
DS: The Japanese were ah,
RA: The Japanese were scattered...
DS: There were quite a few.
RA: Yeah, Japanese were scattered around...
DS: Quite a lot of those. And they harrassed them for quite a while. I don't know if you remember that or not.
RA: ...after the war?
DS: Before. Nineteen thirty-four and five they had a concerted to try to get them out of there.
RA: That was '34 and '35 huh? Well, I didn't know that. I know that Sarah Hardy was always friendly to the Japanese.
DS: Very...toward Japanese, mm-hmm.
RA: And she was ah, she would teach some of those priests the English language so that they could communicate with their people. They'd bring some of those Buddist priests over.
DS: Kids went to Japanese school after they finished their regular day.
RA: Yeah.
DS: They were all good kids, all good students. I don't know a single one that wasn't.
RA: Yeah, in fact if they weren't a good student, the families kept them out on the farm. They wouldn't let them go to school. Huh.
DS: There was, well the Tadadno boys...
RA: I was, I was in Peoria in 19, I went there in '40. Pearl Harbor came along in December of '41, and Bill...called me probably in April or May of '42 and wanted to know if there was any way that the Peoria schools could help educate some of the Japanese kids. Bill...at that time was president of the J.A.C.L. - Japanese-American Citizens League. And in order to get over to Peoria to talk to me, this is '41 ah, '42, it would have been in April or May of '42, in order to get there he couldn't go on the highway to Phoenix.
DS: They drew the line down Grand Avenue and across...
RA: He had to go north and had to go the back route. He couldn't cross Grand Avenue. He couldn't get on Grand Avenue. But he came over to see me, and I said, "How many students do you think you'll have?" He said, "Well," he said, "most of them will be juniors and seniors." He said, "I don't think they'll be over 15 or 20." I said, "Well, let me talk to the board, and we'll see. Let me talk to the Superintendent and we'll talk to the board and see what they say." So we took it up to the board meeting and we had just three board members - Howard Cook, Bill McFredericks, and Pat Coor, and all of them had boys in the service. In fact, Bill McFredericks had already lost one son who was flying fighter, fighter planes over Europe, over Germany, shot down. Uh, but, they all asked the question, "Are these kids citizens of the United States?" I said, "They were all born here." And by definition, anybody born in the United States is a citizen, period. And they said, "Well, if they're citizens, they're entitled to go to school. And if the other schools, Phoenix schools and Glendale schools can't take them, we ought to, we ought to help them." They all had that. And then the next question was, "How do we make this break? Do we tell the community, do we ask the community, or do we just do it? What do we do?" And I can remember very vividly, we had a very active Kiwana's Club, we just organized one in Peoria, we had an active Chamber of Commerce, had an active Women's Club. I said, "Shouldn't we go and talk to these people about it?" And Pat Coor was very adamant. He said, "Don't tell anybody." He said, "Just tell the kids to show up here the first day of school and take care of them."
DS: You just start a controversy if you do.
RA: That's right. And Scottsdale had asked the parents. And they really rose up in arms and Scottsdale schools couldn't take them. And I think, I'm sure whether Tempe's high was able to take any or not. Mesa might've had some, I'm not sure. But, first day of school, I decided I should've at least let the faculty know about these kids. So we called an early faculty meeting at 8 o'clock, and I informed the faculty about it. I guess we had a faculty meeting the day before. I told them about it. I called a student council meeting early that meeting to inform them what was going to happen. I said, "We're going to have some Japanese students here on campus." I said, "We're going to let them enroll." And I wanted them to be sure to treat them friendly and be as good to them as they could. And ah, but before, even before I had my student council meeting the kids were arriving on campus. They got there before 8 o'clock. They wanted to get enrolled. We told them to come at nine, see, but they came at 7:30 some of them. We had 42.
DS: Forty-two.
RA: Forty-two.
DS: From all over the west valley.
RA: From all over, yes, from all, some of them had been going to high school in Tolleson. Some of them, most of them in Glendale, north Phoenix...
DS: Glendale didn't ah, kick anybody out, did they?
RA: Well they couldn't, they couldn't go to Glendale.
DS: Well Ernie Kahutsu was there, in fact he was elected Cardinal King and raised big furor.
RA: What year?
DS: Forty-two.
RA: In '42?
DS: Forty-two.
RA: Did he graduate in '42?
DS: Probably.
RA: They drew the line on April 1, 1942. That's when they had the meeting. April 1. And so all those kids in Glendale and Tolleson and other places, they had to get out of their school April 1. They couldn't go back across that line.
DS: Well I elected Ernie, and there was such a furor in the town that he resigned. Which was kind of sad.
RA: Yeah. Well, but he had to, he had, Kohutsu
DS: He'd always had his kids in Glendale High School.
RA: But ah, we got those kids, none of them were able to finish high school where they were because they pulled out on April 1. And so we had, Mrs. Hardy was the person in the Glendale High School faculty that was most willing to cooperate and help. And we had our teachers correspond, sometimes by phone, sometimes by mail, with the teachers in Glendale. Found out what they had to do to complete the previous year's work see. Those kids had done quite well up until April 1 and then they had to drop out. And so we arranged for those kids to finish their high school, you might say working with the teachers in Peoria with the help of the Glendale teachers. And ah, I think in that first graduating class, class of '43, they probably had 12 or 15 seniors who were Japanese that year. We had, I think we had four Tunita boys, we had Tom,...Suzuki,
DS: Were they treated alright?
RA: Oh yeah. We had no problem at all. There was only one, huh, we only had one little incident the whole year that I knew about...but I remember some of the students came in to see me one day and they wanted to know what we could do with a guy that ran a cafe downtown. Ah, they had taken ah, one of our students, I've forgotten what his, they always called him, the kids sort of nicknamed Hirihito or something. They nicknamed him. He was sort of an onry little devil. His name was Hero Okomiashi. And his brothers had a farm, oh, I would say about lateral 19-1/2 and P Avenue in there somewhere. And he had some older brothers running the farm. And Hero had been going to Glendale, but ah, he had to come Glendale.
DS: I didn't notice. I didn't know they had to leave Glendale.
RA: Oh yeah. Yeah. Most of them were from Glendale. We had some real fine students. Real good students. Ah, but some of the Peoria kids went downtown with Hero, Hirihito, and they sat down at the counter in the cafe next to Pat's Barber Shop and they ordered a sandwich and something to drink, soda pop or something, but the cook came out of the kitchen. And he saw that Japanese kid there, and he came out with a cleaver. He came out of the kitchen and he started after him, this kid. The kid was smart enough to get out of there. And they all left.
DS: How about that.
RA: And ah, they came to me complaining about the action that cook. I said, "Well," I said, "I can't" I said, "I certainly don't stick up for the cook. On the other hand, when Hirihito came here, when Hero came here, he was told that he was not to cross Grand Avenue." He knew that and he should never have gone downtown. In fact none of the Japanese people would ever go downtown. They drove their own cars, but they never went down...But he did, cause he was with these other kids, these Anglos. But I didn't stick up for the cook. But on the other hand I didn't stick up for Hero either. Cause he was doing something he shouldn't have been doing. Say look, "If Hero'd been doing what he should have been doing, he wouldn't have had any of that problem."
DS: Tough times. Can you imagine what it would be like to have, just you were your race, just because you were who you were.
RA: But that was the only incident that we had. I never, Hero was one, he would ditch once in awhile with these Anglos. And I'd get after him. One time I suspended him for, well, for a few days, two or three days I think. And I, one requirement was that he bring his parents back to talk to me before he got back in school. Well his parents didn't speak English, but his brothers did. And so one of the brothers came back with him a couple days later and I told him exactly what Hero was doing. He was late to class, he was ditching classes, he just wasn't...
DS: That's unusual for a Japanese.
RA: Yeah, well it is. He was an unusual type. You couldn't help but like the kid. On the other hand he was onry, he was an onry little devil. And the brother listened and shake his head...I think I kicked him out for a week, but in the meantime I said somebody better come back here and talk to me before you come back see. So his brother came in two or three days, a couple of days after I'd kicked him out. He still had some time to spend outside of school. And ah, when the brother left, he said, "I don't think you're going to have any more trouble with Hero." I said, "What makes you think so?" He says, "Hero doesn't like to operate that tractor." And he said, "If he can't come to school, he's going to be on that tractor at daylight in the morning, and he'll be on that until dark at night." And he said, "I don't think you'll have any more trouble with Hero." And we didn't have. But they don't believe in kids going to school and messing around. They want them to study.
DS: I want to change the subject a little bit. You had at your time, a lot of future journalists going through Glendale High School. Now would you credit Al Levin for that?
RA: Well I think so, yes. We had...
DS: Tell me about him. How'd you get him...
RA: Huh.
DS: It's Levin, isn't it?
RA: A-L-V-I-N L-E-V-I-N. That name is pronounced, back in Baltimore, it's pronounced (Laveen).
DS: Hmm.
RA: But when he came to me, I didn't know what, I called him Levin. He stopped in my office on a Saturday morning before school started on a Monday.
DS: What year would that have been?
RA: Nineteen forty-six.
DS: At Glendale High School?
RA: At Glendale High School. When I went to Glendale, I had the responsibility of hiring, I needed ah, six teachers. I called the placement bureau in Tempe, at U of A, and Flagstaff. There were no teachers available. I sent notices to at least eleven placement agencies outside the State of Arizona. Colorado, California, New Mexico, several, all over.
DS: Great time to be a teacher, huh?
RA: I got one, one applicaion from Colorado. A lady that wrote and said that she would like the job. I listed the job we had. She wanted an English job. She said she, she knew that she could handle the job, she had taught for sixteen years, and each year was in a different school. Well, I didn't want her. But anyway, Saturday morning before school started, he walks in, walks up and he wondered if there was any chance that we had a job open. And we still hadn't hired the full faculty. I'd hired Tilly Lao, did you know Tilly? Tilly Lao was an English teacher. She was an older person. And I'd assigned her Journalism. She didn't want it, but she said she'd teach it. Along with some English. But she didn't want the Journalism, but she'd take it in order to get the job. Another requirement was that I'd help her find a house. I'd help her find a house then...Levin walked in, and he had taught Journalism and English back in the Baltimore High, a Baltimore high school for two or three years. A young man, had a wife who had asthma, and the doctors thought the dry climate in Arizona would be good for her. They had one baby, one little girl just a year old I think. And I, I needed another teacher. I didn't even have enough teachers.
DS: Was he qualified?
RA: Ah, he was a graduate, yes. He'd had training back at the university there back in Baltimore. I've forgotten which one it was now. Yes, he was qualified. So I sent him down to the state, that is he couldn't...it was Saturday morning. I said, "You're going to have to go down and..." I think he'd already been down and found out that he had enough ah, he had everything except the Arizona Constitution...They always gave you a year to get that. But he qualified. I said, "You come to work Monday morning, and I'll give you a Journalism class and some English II or III." I don't remember what it was. But I think I fit him up with four, he had four class periods a day. Then he had publication. He had a newspaper and the annual. So they only had four, I think he only taught four hours a day. And Al was the one that sort of got these kids interested in Journalism. Yeah, we had several there. We had Hugh Harrelson and ah, Jerry Eaton.
DS: Jerry Eaton, mm-hmm. The Rich kids.
RA: George Rich. George and...yeah. Jerry Jackal went into photography, but Levin got him started in that. And Jerry's wife was in, she'd done some writing, and ah, the boy that was from Mayer, Herbie Serrat.
DS: Herbie Serrat on UPI.
RA: Yeah. These were some of the people that ah...
DS: They were all Levin students?
RA: Levin students, yeah. I mean he was more or less...
DS: I missed him. They ah, Journalism when I was there was just sort of handed to whoever was available.
RA: Well, whoever would take it.
DS: ...T. B. Schwartz.
RA: Yeah, T. B. Schwartz. He was a nice guy.
DS: Did you know him?
RA: Yeah, I met him. In fact, he was leaving, he was leaving see. And he got a job in California somewhere. He left. But I got...before he left. He's a nice guy.
DS: A little, round man.
RA: Yeah, he's really roly poly. But Levin came and ah, I told Levin, I said, "I can't promise you a job because the board, only the board can hire." I said, "We're not going to have a board meeting until next Wednesday." But I said, "You come Monday morning and I'll put you to work. And you fill out this application." And he filled out the application. And I didn't have any papers on him or anything else. I did make a phone call back to somebody back in Baltimore and they said he was a good teacher. And he came and started teaching. The first three days everything seemed to be going good, and so I met the board Wednesday night at the board meeting and I said, "I'm recommending," he was one, I think there maybe were one or two others I was recommending that they employ. And I remember Sam Joy looked at that name, and he says, he says, "Is this guy a Jew?" Yeah. I said, "I don't know whether he's Jewish or not." I said, "I don't really know." I said, "Look on the application there." I said, "There's a place there that asks religious preference see."
DS: And they had that on...
RA: And so he looked on there, but Levin hadn't put anything in there, he left it blank, see.
DS: He learned.
RA: I said, "I don't know whether he's Jewish or not." But ah, I said, "I don't care." I said, "He's in the classroom, he's doing a good job first three days."
DS: Did Joy care?
RA: Well listen. When I went to Glendale, they didn't have a Jew on the faculty. If they had a Catholic it was...he was the only one I think. They just didn't employ. They didn't have any Spanish-Americans.
DS: Only one Mormon I think. That was O. W. Allen.
RA: O. W. Allen was the Mormon. Oh, we got one or two more later. Mormons are something different. But anyway, that school was a WASP school.
DS: I'll say it was.
RA: And that's just the way...(whispering) yeah, most of them were, but that one particularly was just sort of run that way.
DS: No Hispanic teachers there at all.
RA: No, none. I hired the first Hispanic, I hired some Catholics. And of course...is a strong nation, and ah, I don't know why. Masonic Order, they, they didn't like the black people.
DS: Or Catholics.
RA: And they didn't like Catholics, see. So you kind of, there were a lot of that kind of feeling going around in the community.
DS: I was shocked to find out that B. B. Moore was an awful bigot. Did you know that? In fact, he was in the Klan for awhile. Yeah. And he said something about, "They'll never have niggers in school with my kids."
RA: Well, that was a public high.
DS: Rather general feeling.
RA: Well, even in Glendale, they had a Ku Klux Klan organization there. In fact, I think, VanCamp's the one that told me about some people belonging to the Klan.
DS: Well almost everybody in Tempe belonged to that. I have the records books, so.
RA: Yeah. You got it all set up, huh. But it, yeah, okay. But Levin did a nice job, and then when it came time to evaluate teachers and recommend for the next year, I recommended he be reemployed. And the board members, one of the commented, said, "Well, when they made him, they threw away the cast, the mold." But, sort of excusing their prejudice away. Well, this guy's different. But he was with us three years I guess.
DS: Is that all.
RA: Only three years.
DS: Why did he leave?
RA: Well, he ah, he did make quite a contribution. He would go into the senior problem classes, and we had, we had some outstanding teachers. John Kerner was a very outstanding, did you know John Kerner?
DS: He wasn't there when I was there.
RA: He came after you. But John Kerner was an outstanding senior problems teacher.
DS: What's senior problems?
RA: Well, that's political...it's a social studies, it's a social studies. But one of the problems was racial and religious predjudice and that type of thing. And Kerner would get Levin to come in with his skull cap, what do you call it,...and his...shawl and talk to him about his religion.
DS: He practiced it though.
RA: He practiced it. He's not too faithful, but he practiced it. And ah, that...you couldn't help but like him...he was rather pointed at times. But I gave, I gave the faculty quite a bit of freedom in doing things. One of the things that the Chamber of Commerce was upset about was that Glendale wasn't getting enough publicity in the paper, in the Phoenix papers. And I said, I said, and they got somebody to come out from the Phoenix...
This is a continuation of the Robert Ashe interview.
RA: was upset because Glendale wasn't getting enough publicity. And, finally I was, I don't know if I was president that year, I was on the board of directors anyway, I suggested maybe we get our Journalism teacher to see if we couldn't generate some stories, Levin was a photographer also, he'd done some pool work. And so they said they'd pay him so much a line, so much an inch for copy, and they'd pay him for his pictures that they could use. So, Levin started ah, writing...
DS: Got his own newsgirl, huh?
RA: Started...so to speak. And he was making $75 - $100 a month. That's darn good money back in those days. Just from the Republic, from the things that he said in the paper. And some of the stuff he sent in was not stuff that I would particularly send in, but he did. Because it had, it was newsworthy. In other words, people would read it. That's what the paper's for. One of them was ah, you know we had those pep stories, pep girls, pep squad, what do they call themselves. Pom-pom girls, I don't know. But in their initiation they made those girls who were going to come into their club, they made them wear funny garments. And one day, three of the girls, part of the initiation, they carried ah, pep cereal, Kellogg's Pep Cereal. And whenever they would meet, see one of them, they'd have to reach in and grab some cereal and eat it. This was the kind of thing. And he caught two of those girls and Levin took their picture holding up their pep cereal boxes and he wrote a story about this damn thing. In the Arizona Republic. Not only did it get in the Republic, it was picked up and printed several places around the country. He got a letter from the, somebody from the Kellogg...
DS: ...
RA: Yeah, and they were happy to know that the girls like the Kellogg's product and so forth. Glad to hear about the story. But I mean, that's the kind of, he'd stick...
DS: He was a hustler. Yeah.
RA: He was a hustler, and he would get, if they had something going on at the Chamber, he'd go down and learn enough about it and ask a few questions and write a story and send it in. And Levin could write rapidly. He didn't waste a lot of time.
DS: Who was supposed to be covering? They always had Glendale reporters...
RA: Well, at that time...
DS: Thelma Heatwole had started by that time I think.
RA: She was with the ah
DS: She was a Herald.
RA: Thelma was with the Herald most of the time. It was after I left that she left the Herald and went with the Republic, or about the time I left I think. But ah, I think that Earl Kazar, who was sort of running the paper boys out in that area, he was responsible for...just like this guy up here...name of Smith here in Prescott. He writes a few stories for the Republic. I think he runs it. He's in charge of the distributorship mainly I think. But anyway, Levin, he started picking up pretty good money on that. So the Chamber got, Glendale got a lot of publicity out of it. We had, one day I got a phone call from the principal out at Phoenix Union High School, I believe it was the principal, it might have been from the District office, asking me if we could take care, could serve as the host for a couple of German educators who were over here to study American schools. They were having faculty meetings or something, and they didn't think the educators would be very interested in seeing what was going on in Phoenix schools that day. I said, "Sure, send them on out. We'd be glad to." And they came out the next morning and I introduced them to some of our students and assigned, I guess I used some of Levin's students really, there, darned Journalist students were running around all over anyway. I let them take them around to visit the classes and take them to shops and answer questions for them. In fact, they went down into the Journalism office, we had that down in the basement, and ah, while they were down there, the editor of the Cardinal Highlights or whatever the Cardinal paper was called,
DS: That's right, Cardinal Highlights.
RA: Anyway, went down there and the editor, a young lady, I don't remember which one it was, she was sitting there, and one educator was leaning over her right shoulder and the other on the left, and Levin took the picture and then they wrote a story. And they wrote quite a lot, he had quite a long story on this thing. Column...maybe a column that long. On these educators and some of the things, how our schools compared to the German schools, just a few of these things. He put a lot of stuff in that. And he got that picture in the paper the next morning and got that in the Phoenix paper the next morning. E. W. Montgomery, meeting with his principals, I guess it was that Friday afternoon or sometime the same week. And oh he was upset, he was mad. Cause they had gone to so much trouble in getting a lot of things about these two guys, getting all ready for a big news story for the Phoenix paper, see,
DS: And Levin scooped them, huh.
RA: And Levin scooped them. And they took their story down and the paper said, "This is not news. This is old stuff. We've already printed." But he'd get things like that, see. And
DS: Why did he leave?
RA: Why? I think it, mainly because of family. His wife's family always wanted them to stay back there. And ah, when he went back there, he started working for his father-in-law. His father-in-law was an auctioneer. And he told me about the way he worked for his father-in-law. But he couldn't get along with his father-in-law. He didn't like the way his father-in-law operated. The father-in-law would send him over to talk to one of the judges, and he'd put several $20 bills in a white envelope and he'd seal it with no name or anything on it, and he'd say, "You take this over and give it to Judge so-and-so." And the father-in-law, the judges would assign who would take care of the auctioning of some of the estates where people would die and they got to auction off their stuff. And so the way the father-in-law got his business was by, bribing them. He didn't like that. And another thing that really upset him was after his father-in-law, after he went back there to work with his father-in-law, his father-in-law would go out and buy, he would go buy a whole house full of furniture. Everything. And then they'd take it all down to the store and sort it out and decide whether to sell it or give it away or what to do with it. But they had one house they got furniture in, they got a trunk up in the attic. It was filled with postage stamps, old postage stamps. And his father-in-law put Al to work on those postage stamps, sorting them all out, getting them all organized, and when they finally got through with those postage stamps, I think that they sold that collection of postage stamps for better than $10,000, which is three times as much as they paid for everything in the house. And the father-in-law said thanks to him, but he never gave him, didn't give him any money for it at all. He paid almost minimum wages to him.
DS: Did he come out for his health? Or what did he come out here anyway?
RA: Came out for his wife's, well, tell you the truth, he came out cause he got mad at his father-in-law. I think. He got fed up with the way they were treating him back there.
DS: But he did go back after three years.
RA: Then he went back, yeah. Things change. You know you leave.
DS: Now to conclude our discussion Dick, when you left Glendale in 1955, right, you went over to the faculty at Arizona State. Now, you had seen some changes in town at that time, and this was on the verge, you might say, when the growth of Glendale really started. Did you see signs of that as you were leaving?
RA: Oh yes. In fact, ah, even when we started proposing we have second and third high schools, we told the community that we should expect to have several more high schools because there's no question about it, growth was coming because Glendale and the Washington area was the, local, logical location for growth in particular with I-17 going in. It was the, just the undisputable area in which growth was going to take place. I was there nine years, and we probably, I would judge that our high school enrollment, the year I left we had probably about probably 1,000 in Glendale and we probably had about 800 or 900 in Sunnyslope, and when we opened the Washington school I think we had pretty close to 500 the first year in Washington. And since I've left there, they built six more high schools.
DS: I think there are nine now.
RA: There are nine now, okay. Yeah, so we saw the growth coming, but ah, of course no one could exactly, I don't think we understood exactly how the growth would take place. And I think since then we've realized that a larger percentage of our population would be retired people, and that there'd be retirement homes being built. See, we didn't have retirement homes back in those days. Oh, there were...
DS: And never a hotel. Isn't that something?
RA: Yeah.
DS: Glendale still doesn't have a big hotel.
RA: Ah, wasn't, wasn't there one hotel across the street from where the post office used to be?
DS: Oh they had little hotels...
RA: Olive Hotel, wasn't that the Olive Hotel?
DS: That was in Tempe, but there was a Glenwood and there was a
RA: Glenwood, the Glenwood, yeah...been torn down.
DS: But I'm talking about there was no...
RA: Oh no, nothing big.
DS: There wasn't a Camelback or a San Marcos or anything like that.
RA: And even when they started building ah tourist, border home courts,...he had a few...not first class. No, and then there's the one where, there's still one there, I don't know what they call it now.
DS: But ah, one thing that's always puzzled me, is that the west side always seemed to lag about ten years behind the east side. What do you think the reason for that was? Ah, that was one thing, hotels, another was artistically. I'm sure you noticed that.
RA: Yes.
DS: Ah, what was the reason?
RA: Well I think part of the lag was the fact that it was very much of an agricultural community for so long, and a lot of the people in that area like the Japanese farmers and the Russian farmers and so forth, were not ah, active participants in community organizations and so forth. And I don't know why, but ah, you might say they lagged. There were a lot of good people there.
DS: It's finally coming now. It's just now beginning. Marie Sands has done a lot in the art field.
RA: Yeah.
DS: Do you know her?
RA: Oh yes.
DS: Yeah, uh-huh, and various other people. But there isn't a little gallery over there of any kind that I know of. And strangely enough there isn't a daily newspaper on the whole west side...On the east side every town has one. This puzzles me. Why this huge difference.
RA: How many newspapers do they have now? They have weeklies...In Glendale, Glendale.
DS: There's one weekly, the Star.
RA: Star. Just the one?
DS: Just the one. I was just over interviewing the publisher last, two weeks ago. But he publishes about, or prints about eight newspapers.
RA: Yeah.
DS: From one shop.
RA: You see, the whole economy's changed. Ah, a hundred years ago who ever thought of anybody having as many as eight newspapers? But it became such that if you bought the equipment to do your publishing, you might as well publish several at the same time. And we saw this coming on back in well, the late 50's and early 60's. There wasn't any way to predict some of these things. Of course, Pulliam came out and took over two papers. But he didn't try to put up...in the various communities like some publishers have done.
DS: No.
RA: I don't know. I can't give you an answer to that. I don't know why.
DS: There isn't a symphony orchestra in Glendale. This is the fourth largest city in the state. And you wonder, ah, even Gilbert has a symphony, Chandler has a symphony. Tempe. Mesa. Scottsdale. They all have community symphony orchestras. I'm just puzzled as to the reason.
RA: Well I don't know. I don't know the reason. But it's a conservative community. And ah, people.
DS: They're very proud of Saguaro Ranch Park. Had they started that before you left?
RA: Is that the one out north?
DS: Right next to the community college.
RA: No, that came on later. Yeah, that hadn't been.
DS: You're thinking of Thunderbird Park.
RA: Yeah, I'm thinking about Thunderbird Park, yeah. We (wife: you did some work on developing of Thunderbird Park) Have we done more on that Thunderbird Park? Have we done quite a bit out there? We haven't been out there, never.
DS: I think is sort of...
RA: ...sort of dying on the vine?
DS: Well, it hasn't moved as fast as they thought, but the Saguaro Ranch Park has developed...the city owns it and it was the old Bartlett Saguaro Ranch.
RA: Yeah, yeah, Saguaro Ranch, yeah.
DS: And they, part of it is the new library, the city library on the north side, and the community college is on the south side. And then...is where the historical society is. So it's, there's a lot of activity out there. It's near Olive and ah 59th Avenue. But that, boy that ten miles north of town, there, along 59th is really something. They've got, ah, of course the Graduate School of International Management, they've got Ironwood High School, they've got the hospital.
RA: Thunderbird Hospital.
DS: And finally, out at the end is Arrowhead Ranch which is a, now that's sort of stalled too, but ah, that's a ten miles that has really, it's amazing to see...
RA: Now, when I was in high school there, we used to go out north of the canal, out on the desert and hunt rabbits. There wasn't anything out there then.
DS: Reverend Tuckey tells about capturing wild horses and donkeys out there where the Graduate School is right now. Now you were in school with Bert Fireman.
RA: Well, Bert finished the year before I...
DS: That's right, he was a year ahead of you. You and Thelma were in the same class.
RA: And I only went to Glendale one year, my senior year.
DS: So you didn't know Bert in high school.
RA: No, cause Bert was ah, kind of a guy, you always knew Bert Fireman was around somewhere. He was a big guy and he'd be around school. His sister was in Bob's class.
DS: I never knew her.
RA: I...what her name was. Gertrude, Gertrude, Gertrude Fireman. She was a good student.
DS: Now they had Sam Fireman's grocery.
RA: Yeah.
DS: And they were the only Jewish people in town that I knew. There'd been a Newman family before that.
RA: Well, the...
DS: Sorta, they had been Jewish. But they had to go to Phoenix to the
RA: To the synagogue.
DS: I don't whether Glendale has a synagogue yet. Ah, I don't think so.
RA: I don't know, I really don't know. But then they got, quite a few Jewish came into the community...some of them were...
DS: Would you say it was a Wasp community?
RA: Oh yeah, yeah. I think, trying to think of the name of the man that ah had a clothing store right across from Lukins Pharmacy there. Hmmm, the name's in here somewhere. RV, no, hmmm.
DS: Well, to summarize then, I do need to wind this up, ah, you saw then that they were on the threshold in '55 when you left.
RA: ...
DS: But they really hadn't started annexing yet according to the records.
RA: No, I don't know whether that related to requiring that the laws be changed...I don't know the details on that.
DS: It wasn't until they annexed about half of Maryvale in 1960-61 that it really got started.
RA: It got started then.
DS: That was the big hunk that they...all at one time.
RA: And the same thing about the growth of Phoenix. You know, it was just a small community geographic-wise. And now it's spread out, I don't know how many square miles it includes, but a big territory now.
DS: Well I was amazed, Glendale is, it was ten miles west clear out to Luke and ten miles north out to Arrowhead Ranch. And Peoria's in the middle.
RA: Yeah, we just came back from California and came by way of Barstow and Kingman, six miles before we got to Barstow we saw the signs, Barstow City Limits. Still just desert. Nothing but desert. We went another two or three miles before we came on any houses.
DS: So you feel the kinship...went to school there, you principaled there, superintendent for a long time. So you still have a lot of friends over there?
RA: Well I think, we, yes, we don't see them as much as we, I'd say most of our friends now are former students. A lot of the people that were friends of ours when we were there are now gone.
DS: You moved to Prescott in what year?
RA: We went to, we went to Tempe in '55, and then we came up here in '82.
DS: So you've been up here almost ten years.
RA: It will be nine years in September. So we're beginning to feel like Prescott is home now.
DS: I'm sure you are. Bob, I want to thank you, ah, I'm sure the tape will be an addition to the library there at the Glendale Historical Society, and thanks a lot.
This is the end of the interview with Robert Ashe.

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INTERVIEW OF DR. ROBERT ASHE
This is Dean Smith, speaking to Dr. Robert Ashe is Prescott on May 29, 1991.
DS: Bob, you came to Glendale in what, '45?
RA: 1946.
DS: '46. As Superintendent of the high school.
RA: July 1, 1946.
DS: But you had been in Glendale a long time before that, in the area.
RA: Oh, we lived in Glendale in 1930, '31 when I was a senior in high school. I graduated from high school about the first of June, 1931.
DS: From Glendale High.
RA: Glendale High, then fifteen years later I went back as Superintendent of the District. When I went back there were still seven teachers there that'd been there when I was there.
DS: Is that right. Do you remember who they were?
RA: Well I think I can name some of them. ...Rauch, H. L. Renick, Sarah ..., Winifred Smith, ...Weiss, uh, Carey.
DS: Oh, Carey's dead, yeah. How bout Gale Van Camp?
RA: Yeah, Gale Van Camp.
DS: He wasn't on the faculty.
RA: No, he wasn't on the faculty, but he was a very influential member on the campus.
DS: That's right, mm-hmm.
RA: He was there before Mr. Yelman in fact. I think Gale Van Camp started working for the school district as early as 1920, and he was the head custodian. I relied on Van Camp for a lot of information and a lot of counseling 'cause Van was a man who could listen and didn't have to talk all of the time. But when you'd ask him was to size things up, he would be willing to make his judgment known. Yes, I appreciated him very much. He was a very fine man. He was a good, a good employee. He was very loyal to the school district, he was loyal to the staff. Very cooperative, and if he didn't think something was quite right, he didn't hesitate to say so, but if you overruled him, that was alright. In other words, he didn't hold it against you at all. When I went there the district had just started growing, right after World War II. And my predecessor, Mr. Yelman, had indicated one of the things we had to do was to look forward to making to doing to do some more building to take care of the student body. I don't remember exactly the number of students, I think there were around 650 students. But I went there in 1946, and the school was growing at about 100 students per year, maybe a little more than that. And so we had to start thinking about additional school facilities.
DS: Had you added Sunnyslope by that time?
RA: No, Sunnyslope came about following a study that we had made by the professors at the University of Southern California. They recommended that we build a school in the Sunnyslope area. And they said that we should build one in the Washington area. Because of our growth. It was very evident that the growth was going to continue and evan increase in numbers, and it did. I think we opened the school in Sunnyslope in 1950, and then, even the Sunnyslope proposition was not a particularly popular one in the Glendale area. A lot of the people in Glendale thought that if we built a school in Sunnyslope it would prevent drawing the people from the Sunnyslope area to the Glendale area for their marketing. Thought they wouldn't come over and patronize the stores. Well, as a matter of fact, they weren't coming over anyway. They were going to Phoenix for their shopping. And ah, it was not a very popular issue to build the Sunnyslope High School. But the people in Glendale approved it, as did the people in the district.
DS: Well Sunnyslope was in Phoenix then wasn't it?
RA: Yeah, it was in the city, it was in the city limits of Phoenix, yes.
DS: Was then.
RA: It was then too, well, not, I think it was.
DS: Well that's a long way from Glendale High School. I drove it just the other day, and its ah
RA: Nine miles.
DS: Is it nine miles?
RA: About nine miles, approximately.
DS: That's quite a ways for two schools in the same district isn't it?
RA: Well, yes. Quite a ways, quite a ways to transport those kids. We had quite a number of buses running over there transporting those students.
DS: And some came from east of Sunnyslope High, so they went even further.
RA: Yes. But Sunnyslope, ah, our district boundaries went as far as, I think it's 16th Street on the east side.
DS: Yeah, see, that's quite a way east.
RA: Yes. And of course they went out north to Bell Road, so there's a lot of area there where the race track is now. That was developed, it was developed before I went to Glendale, just about that time. But ah, we figured that by building the high school in Sunnyslope we could cut down on some of the transportation problems with transporting students. But when we got ready to go with the high school in the Washington area, the people in the district voted against it. Voted it down, not a great, not a fantastic margin, but it was voted down rather decisively. The people in the Washington area blamed themselves because they didn't really get their group out to vote. And they wanted the board to call an election for another chance to build the Washington High School. The board said, "Look, we have called one election. We did what we thought was right; the people said no. We don't feel that we should put the pressure on them again." And so the people in the Washington area got a petition out and petitioned for an election. And they proposed the terms of the election in the same, using the same wording that the board had proposed, and of course the board had no alternative but to, they had to accept it, call the election. Call for an election. Well in that election the board did not go out and actively support the bond issue. They were not opposed to it, they were in favor of it, but because it was voted down the first time they just didn't feel like it was proper for them to go out and push it.
DS: When was that first election?
RA: Well, it must have been about 195...it was probably 1954.
DS: I have a record of it so I can check.
RA: Yeah, you probably have a record of it. It was not many months later that the people of the district petitioned for another election, and that had to be held in a specified time, and of course advertised and all that. But the people in the Washington area were the ones that were really pushing it. And they set up what they called "coffee clutches." And they asked, they got their parents together of the students, and they elected their own leaders, I don't even remember who the leaders were. But they elected their leaders, and they asked their parents to, or couples to invite four or five of their neighbors in to talk about the bond issue. And they put out a one page fact sheet. They just called it FACTS. And they decided they would not ask these people to vote for the bond issue, but they would merely bring them together and explain the facts about the growth of the district and the inadequate housing and ask them to, they asked each of them within a matter of three to five days to have a "coffee clutch" in their own home and invite other people who hadn't been invited yet. And this thing spread, not just in the Washington area, but spread into Glendale. I remember Dr. Wright, a dentist, his wife was rather active in some of the circles, and they invited some people in in the Glendale area to have coffee at their house. And later he said, "You know, I didn't realize that this thing was so unpopular." he said. "I don't think of anybody that came to that meeting that acted to me like they were going to vote for that." We said, "We didn't ask them to vote for it, but we didn't ask for them to vote against it either."
DS: Why were they against it?
RA: Well, same reason, they anticipated that it would increase their taxes. And of course some people just didn't believe that Glendale was growing like it was. They just couldn't believe that. And they though we were joking when we said we'd have to go on double sessions. Well before we got finished with the high school built, we had to go on double sessions. We actually started classes as early as six o'clock in the morning, and we had some students coming between six and twelve; we had all the sophomores, now all the juniors and seniors were scheduled for morning classes. All the freshmen were scheduled for afternoon classes, and the sophomores, we divided them, so that half of them came in the morning and half in the afternoon. And the reason was that we needed ten classes of biology and we had only one classroom. So we had two teachers teaching biology; one of them in the morning and one in the afternoon. Each with a full load. But we had only one classroom. And so we were really crowded that year. But really, it was a good year. The teachers that taught in the morning, they liked that cause they had all afternoon free. Those who were late risers, they liked that afternoon session. And so, some teachers had to teach both morning and afternoon.
DS: Both were held at the Glendale High School.
RA: That was at Glendale High School.
DS: That was before you got Sunnyslope finished.
RA: That was before we had, before we were able to move into Sunnyslope.
DS: Now let me ask you an obvious question. Why was the Glendale District so large in the first place? It extended from east Phoenix clear to the west Valley.
RA: You have to remember that the Glendale Union High School District I think, was organized in 19, I believe it was 1912, I may be wrong on that date. It would be in the history.
DS: I have that too. The school
RA: Maybe 1910
DS: 1910, because the school was finished in 1912.
RA: Okay, 1910 was when they had the election. And I believe the man who they employed to start with was B. H. Scudder, who later moved to Tempe. And B. H. Scudder was also superintendent up in Jerome when they built Jerome High School...and he had three daughters, three daughters, and all of them were teachers. And B. H. Scudder was a, he was sort of a trader, a horse trader. And while he was in Glendale, I think Van Camp told me some of the stories about B. H. Scudder. Said if somebody had a horse they wanted to trade they'd call him. He was apt to leave the school to go take a look at the horse. He'd trade horses and cattle and anything else. He was sort of an entrepreneur.
DS: But you started to tell me why it was so large.
RA: Why was the district so large.
DS: Going clear to north Phoenix.
RA: Going back to 1910, the students who were, the young people of high school age living in the Peoria and Glendale area all had to go to Phoenix to high school. It was the only high school in the Valley. And so it was decided that they should organize a school closer to them.
DS: Even Buckeye, I know ah, Charlie Mitten tells about going into Phoenix Union, his kids.
RA: Yeah, there were a lot of them like that. And I don't know exactly, I wasn't there during that organizational period, that was before my time, but ah, Glendale was just a small community. There was no Sunnyslope at that time. Nothing at all. There was no community called Washington. There was an agricultural area out there, practically all farms, but no community. No density of population at all. And the schools would just, they would just draw lines as to where they thought it might be and they'd have the election and the election specified the boundaries. And they'd just decide that was a good boundary area. They included both the Washington elementary and the Glendale elementary districts. So the boundaries really encompassed both of those districts.
DS: I know, that's where the kids came from at the high school, out of Washington.
RA: Yes.
DS: And Alhambra.
RA: Well, Alhambra, Alhambra was not in the Glendale district. It was a part of the Phoenix Union High School District. But a lot of the kids continued to come to Glendale from the Alhambra area.
DS: That's right, I remember that.
RA: Yes. In fact, ah, while I was there, the Phoenix Union High School was growing too. And Dr. Montgomery thought the only way to solve their problem was to make all these Sunnyslope kids and the kids from the Washington area who were going to Phoenix, make them go to their own school. And so they adopted a policy not allowing any student outside their district to come into their school unless they paid tuition. Well when they did that, we felt in order to save our own necks so to speak, that we were growing too, we, the board had to adopt the same kind of policy. And when we did that, it meant that a lot of kids living just south of Glendale, as few as two and three miles south of Glendale, who were in the Pendergast District, and they were coming to Glendale High School. They could even catch one of the buses and come in. But when they had to go to a Phoenix High School, some of those kids had to walk into Glendale, catch a city bus, and be transported into Phoenix, make a transfer in order to get on another bus to get out to the school they were attending. So when the district boundaries were drawn back in, well the Washington Elementary District was organized I think probably in the 1880s sometime, and the Glendale Elementary District, Glendale is District #40...
DS: Glendale was 40, I remember that.
RA: Glendale was #40?
DS: I don't know why, but
RA: Well it's the fortieth elementary district that was organized in Maricopa County.
DS: ...that's a big, a big number.
RA: Well you see, the Peoria District is #11. They organized the elementary district in Peoria before they did the Glendale District.
DS: Well Peoria's older than Glendale.
RA: Yeah. And so the numbers go with the sequence of the organization. So when they organized the Glendale Union High School District, and this was a piece of legislation they got from California. California had unionized school districts. And unionized school districts don't appear in more than about twelve or fourteen states. In most of the states they have the school system in grades K through 12. Just one budget and so forth. Whereas in Arizona at that time, even when I went to Glendale in 1946, ah, you had a high school, you had a union high school board, you had an elementary school board. Both of them entirely separate. A person on one board could not serve on the other by law. So that, and then there were a lot of schools like Peoria, they had the Peoria Elementary District and Peoria High School District, the board of, the board of trustees for the elementary district constituted the board of education of the high school district. And essentially we were supposed to keep two sets of minutes, one for the elementary district when the trustees met, and one for the high school district when the board of education met. Had to have two different budgets, and had to, had to keep your accounts separate and everything. So you charge...when you bought gasoline you paid for part of it with the elementary issued funds and part with the high school district funds. Had two different taxes. Had a tax rate for the elementary district and one for the high school district. I know that there's quite a few people in the Glendale area that thought the Union High School District were paying our teachers too much. We had too high of salaries. They thought that we ought to do something to control the salaries. But high school salaries were so low that we couldn't prevent teachers from going to Phoenix. We lost a lot of good teachers. And Phoenix had a policy when I went there, or shortly after I went there. They would not employ a person unless they had a degree and unless they had at least one year teaching experience in another school. So the teachers, the people that graduated from Tempe couldn't go into the Phoenix Union High School District unless they went out somewhere else and taught for one year and then they could apply in Phoenix.
DS: By a degree, do you mean a Bachelor's Degree?
RA: Well, a Bachelor's Degree, yes.
DS: They've even starting requiring Master's...
RA: Yes, Phoenix Union High School started requiring Master's about that time. They required a Master's Degree and one year of teaching. And so we lost a lot of good teachers. We lost...like Al Davis, we lost Steve ..., we lost what was their track coach's name? Do you remember, ah, I can't remember his name now. He was one of the that kidded Barbara about the freckles on her face. I can't remember his name (background whisper), Stengland, Jim Stengland.
DS: Oh, Jim Stengland. I remember him when he was in college. Great pole vaulter.
RA: Yeah. We lost a lot of good teachers. Well, we lost young Vernon...and ah
DS: Did he teach at Glendale first?
RA: Yeah, he taught at Glendale first then he went into Phoenix. They offered him more money. They always offered $400 or $500 a year more than Glendale.
DS: I'll tell you something else. Before that, ASU or ASTC lost a lot of faculty because paid them more too.
RA: Yes, yes, some of the people teaching at the college in Tempe were offered contracts over at Phoenix Union District. They went over there to teach.
DS: They were notoriously low-paid in Tempe.
RA: Well during the Depression they, the Tempe salaries I think, they cut the full professors back to $1,600 a year...Burkhart, Grimes...some of those people, yeah, cut them way back. ...actually when we opened the Sunnyslope High School we intended to start, we proposed we start with a two-year high school, freshmen and sophomores, because ...take care of the juniors and seniors over in Glendale. However, once it became known that we were going to have a high school there, a lot of the juniors and seniors asked that we go ahead and offer a full high school program. They wanted to go to Sunnyslope High. They wanted to stay near home to go to school. And so we started out with a four year high school. About half the seniors continued on at Glendale. The other half transferred to Sunnyslope. And we had juniors, I think there were a little more than half of them started in Sunnyslope when we first started. So we started out as a four year high school.
DS: Let me ask you something. Your title was Superintendent or Principal?
RA: Well, it was essentially, I was really a Superintendent and a Principal, essentially.
DS: That confused me because superintendents are usually over more than one school.
RA: Yes, ordinarily they do. However, it depends on your definition of superintendent. The superintendent is usually the chief executive officer of a school district, and a principal is usually the head educational leader in a school. Well if you've only got one school, you're both, you could be both see.
DS: What was your title on your contract?
RA: Well, I don't, on the contract I think it was Superintendent. But I've not, I don't remember for sure. In fact, many of those years that I was there I didn't even have a contract. Cause I never, I never did believe in more than a one-year contract. When I told the board that I was going to go to Tempe in 1955, they offered me a four-year contract. Well, they'd offered me a longer term contract a time or two before and I'd refused it in every case. But I told them that I'd prefer not to have more than a one-year contract. If they wouldn't want me, then I sure...
DS: That's unusual...
RA: No, I never, in fact some years went by that they didn't even set my salary until they had to make payroll up in July. Finally at the board meeting in July I'd say, "Look, we gotta send the payroll in before the 15th, what are you going to pay me this year?" So they'd just tell me what the salary was. I didn't even have a formal contract for many years I was there. (whispering) Well, they paid me, I was one of the higher paid administrators in the state. I was probably fifth or sixth highest paid. E. W. Montgomery was the highest paid, then the superintendent down in Tucson, Bob Morrow had a good salary, and Charlie Carson, his assistant had a good salary. And then Harvey Taylor over in Mesa had a pretty good salary, but I was about the fifth or sixth highest. I never received a salary of more than $10,000 a year while I was there. Fact I went there at $4,500.
DS: That was a lot of money then.
RA: Yeah, it was. I started out as Superintendent in Peoria at $3,600, second year they gave me $3,600. And I made $4,200 the third year I believe. I don't remember.
DS: ...Peoria High before as superintendent?
RA: I went to Peoria in 1940, and I could not become the principal because I didn't have my Master's Degree, and I had just started working on my Master's Degree at Arizona State at that time. So they called me up. I started...Mr. Jansen...well I don't think they called me a counselor, they called me something else, I don't remember what it was, it was a coordinator I believe. I believe they used the word coordinator. And when I first went to Peoria High School I taught one or two classes. But essentially I did the work of a high school principal. I did all of the scheduling and I interviewed the teachers and I took care of everything that a high school principal would do.
DS: Was...there at that time?
RA: ...Jansen was there. When I went there he was 70 years old. And ah, he told me that he had tried to resign but the board didn't want him to. And he didn't know what to do, and so he stayed on. But ah, the year before I went there, the kids had gotten out of control. He was serving as a superintendent and a high school principal and the elementary school principal. He was serving as all of them. And when finally the year that he finally told me, he said, "I'm gonna retire this year. I'm not gonna let them talk me out of it." And he said, "I think they'll probably want to put you in as superintendent." I'd been there three years. And when he, he asked me to go to the board meeting with him, I did. And when he handed in his resignation, three board members read it and they laid it on the table and none of them said a word to each other. They didn't act on it, they didn't do anything about it. And the next day he said, he said, "What do you make, what do you make of that?" he said. "Are they going to accept my resignation or what, or what?" I said, "I don't know. I don't know." He said, "I'd sure like to know." He said, "I, I think it's time I retire." And I know, I was a very good friend of Pat Coor by that time, he and I were playing golf on Sundays. And Pat said, Pat asked me, he said, "Does Mr. Jansen want to retire?" He said, "We have never been sure that he really wanted to." And he said, "He's done so much good for our district that we don't want to let him go unless he really wants to." I said, "Well, he tells me he wants to. And he tells me that he's disappointed that you people won't accept his resignation." Well then, we worked it out that we would, his salary, his salary...I think they were paying him $3,600 a year.
DS: His last year.
RA: Yeah, $3,600. And they didn't think they ought to pay me as much as they paid him because he'd been there a long time. I didn't ask for a salary, I'd never asked for a salary rate anyway. In fact, when I went there Mr. Jansen asked me what it would take to get me to come to Peoria. I was teaching down in Yuma. And the reason, the reason I got hired ...up to Peoria is to fill in the last six weeks in home economics because Leslie, did you know Leslie Wilcox? She married, what was his name, married, I don't know, well anyway, she was pregnant and she had to take time off to have a baby. And she...and ah, Mr. Jansen asked Mrs...Eva Sculley where he could get a teacher for the last six weeks. And so actually Mr. Jansen contacted...We were running short on money. I was trying to build my house in Yuma, I built it myself, and we only borrowed $2,000 and we were running a little short on money. And I needed to go to summer school, I wanted to go to summer school. I'd gone to one session back at the State University in Iowa, but I took graduate work in chemistry. I wanted to start at Tempe, work on my Master's Degree in Educational Administration. And so Mr. Jansen called her and talked to her and she went up for an interview and he hired her for the last six weeks. And I'd never met Mr. Jansen until the last day of school, I went up to help her, actually we had our graduation in Yuma on Thursday night and Peoria was having theirs on Friday night. So I went up and I helped her carry the punch out of the basement and they had cookies and punch that they, after graduation exercise they set up tables outside and had cookies and punch and everybody who went to the ceremony would stand around and talk and drink punch and eat cookies. And I met Mr. Jansen in that atmosphere, and we chatted a little bit, nothing much said, we just visited. Helen went back Saturday morning to turn in her keys, Mr. Jansen asked her if she thought I'd be at all interested in a job. And she said, "No, I don't think so, but his salary is quite a bit more than teachers in Peoria are getting, so I don't think he would be." And she passed it off at that. And he said, "Well, if he is interested in a job, I'd like to talk to him." And she came home, she didn't say anything to me until the middle of next week, about Wednesday of next week. She remembered, we were in the process of trying to move, we built a house...moving over there. So about the middle of the week she said, "Oh, by the way, Mr. Jansen asked me if there was any chance that you might be interested in a job. I told him I didn't think you would be." I said, "Well what did he say? What kind of job was it?" Well, she didn't know. So I called Mr. Jansen and I went over on Saturday morning and had a long talk with him. And ah, he still acted like he wanted me, but, although I couldn't understand why. But he wanted me to go talk to board members, and the board members were, one of them was a barber and two of them were farmers. I went down and talked to the barber, he was communcative, he was very friendly, but didn't ask many questions or anything else. I felt rather embarrassed going down and saying, "Mr. Jansen asked me to come down and talk to you." But that was the thing. I said, "He wants to consider me for a job or something." So I talked to the farmer while he was on a tractor. He shut his tractor off and we sat there and talked for a few minutes. And I talked to the other one, he was milking a cow. So my first...was I didn't know whether I really wanted the job or not. And then after he talked to the board, they offered me the job, then he wanted to know what it would take to get me to come in the way of salary. I said, "Well, I was going to be getting, I think $1,600 or $1,650 out of Yuma." I said, "I didn't think I could think about moving for less than that." And I figured that, I knew they were only paying the teachers $1,200. And I said to him, I said, "Well, I don't think I could move for less than $1,900." Well, he didn't say anything, but he called me back in about a week and said, "Well, we'll offer you the job at $1,900." The reason I'm telling you this is at the end...
DS: Yeah, I need to get onto the Glendale...
RA: Yeah, at the end of the first year I began to try to get Mr. Jansen and ah, to get the board to increase the salaries of the teachers. And I surely thought it would cost in terms of tax rate and this, that, and the other, didn't amount to much. And so we did, and the board increased the teachers' salaries from $1,200 to $1,400. Gave them all a $200 raise. Which was pretty good. And then he came around to me about a month later, and he said, "The board wants to, the board has done a very nice thing for you. They've increased your salary to $2,000 for next year." So I got, I got a $100 raise and the teachers got a $200 raise, and I didn't say a word. I figured well, they wanted me. And I was happy, I was learning. I learned a lot that first year. (whispering)
DS: Yeah, we need to go onto Glendale.
RA: We need to get over to Glendale.
DS: Yeah.
RA: Well, after I'd been in Peoria for six years, the Glendale job opened up.
DS: Mr... had some difficulty about that time.
RA: Actually,...
DS: He had been there ah,
RA: He'd been there since 1931.
DS: Since 1930.
RA: 1930. He'd been there 16 years. His main, actually, well I think he had problems all the time he was there.
DS: Yes he did. There was always somebody trying to get him fired.
DS: Alway something. But the thing that really teed, teed off the board, so I was told later, he, someway or other, they blamed him for letting Mutt Ford get away from them and going over to Mesa to coach. That was the thing that really upset. And the day, and the night that they were to consider extending his salary, giving him another long-term contract, he excused himself from the board meeting and went down to the library. And he stayed down there about an hour, and finally he couldn't figure out why these guys didn't come and call him back into the meeting. And finally, he, Mr...went back up to the meeting and rapped on the door and went in, and ah, he said, "Well, have you made up your mind as to what you're going to do in the way of my contract?" And all this time they hadn't been talking about his contact at all. They'd been talking about football and other things. They were more concerned about losing their coach and this, that, and the other. And they really hadn't talked about his contract.
DS: Now Ford had, had succeeded Crouch then?
RA: Yeah, Crouch had gone into the military see.
DS: ...came in there too, didn't he?
RA: ...came in, but I think...came in...was in the military too. He came in after the war. Of course Crouch came back the year that I went there. Crouch had just come out of the service. So he came back on the job. But ah, so, and Crouch did not want to go back into coaching. Ah, and this was one of the things, the board wanted Crouch to go back into coaching. But he had already told Mr... that he would not coach football. He did not want to coach football. And so they spent all that time just talking about football and this, that, and the other and never got around to his contract. But someway or other Mr...got the idea that because they didn't do anything that they were getting to fire him. And he called, I think he called the faculty the next morning, and he told his teachers that he'd been fired, hoping to generate some response on the part of the teachers to come to his rescue. And his wife was a librarian, and she got word out to the students so I was told. And the board never told me this, one of the women there told me this, that some of the students came in with a petition signed by two or three hundred students asking them not to fire him, to keep him. Another group of students came in with about an equal number of signatures that said go ahead and fire him. And, and the teachers ah, there were very few of them, there were a few of them, but ah sort of generated some, but most of them did not want to take any part in it. And actually, he fired himself. And this kind of upset the board when they got these petitions and things, and so they said, "Well, maybe the best thing..." I didn't apply for the job. The thing that happened was that Ray...came out to see me. And I think two or three people had talked, well, yeah, Ray was the first one that came out. And ah, he came out to talk to me one day at Peoria High School. We chatted for quite some time. He said, "Well, I wish you'd put in an application." I said, "Well, I'm not sure if I want to apply. I just don't know what the conditions are down there." And I knew they'd been having some problems.
DS: But they were on the verge of this big growth you knew.
RA: Yeah, I knew that, yeah.
DS: It's gotta be a big job.
RA: Yeah, and so, Ray went back and I think the next day he brought Sam Joy out to visit with me. And then in the later part of the week he brought ah (wife talking in background). I've forgotten the details. Carl...Carl was more interested in running the financial part of running the district. I think he wanted to know whether, he wanted to assure himself that I knew something about school finance and so forth.
DS: Did you have your Master's by that time?
RA: Yeah I had my Master's. I got my Master's in ah, hmm forty, 1942. (wife said he'd started his Doctorate by then) I didn't start the Doctorate...until I went to Glendale. That was the first year that I went to Glendale. I went over to USC just for the four-week session I think...
DS: Is that where you got your ah,
RA: Doctorate at USC.
DS: Did you get a EDD or PHD?
RA: Yeah, EDD.
DS: At USC.
RA: Yeah, 19, I got that in '53. The reason I remember this, seven come eleven. I got my Master's Degree seven years after I got my Bacalaureate, and I got my Doctorate eleven years after I got my Master's. Seven come eleven.
DS: Well tell me something about the conditions in Glendale. Now you'd been gone fifteen years...
RA: I left Glendale in 1931, and went to school at Flagstaff.
DS: Had it changed a lot in that length of time?
RA: In that period of time?
DS: Between '31 and '45, or '46?
RA: No, it hadn't really. It hadn't changed a lot.
DS: No, I wouldn't think it would, but after that it really started didn't it?
RA: Even the high school. I don't remember how many students there were in high school when I was there, but I think there were about 56 or 60 in our graduating class. And ordinarily you would multiply that by six and you'd get the high school enrollment. So six times 60 would be 360. There were probably 350 - 400 kids in the high school when I was there.
DS: And we had 90 in our class. 1940, so you see, it hadn't grown that much.
RA: No, then in 1946, when I went back, I think they only had around 650 or so.
DS: So it just grew slowly.
RA: Slow growth.
DS: Now you started to tell me who was running things. That was one of the first things you mentioned there.
RA: Well, actually, running things at the school?
DS: No, in the town.
RA: In the town. In the town, I think that the one man that I think had more respect overall than almost anybody was Harry Bonsall, Sr.
DS: Yeah, that's what everybody says.
RA: I think he had, and he didn't ah, push himself. He didn't...
DS: He didn't run for office.
RA: No, he didn't want to.
DS: Never wanted to be mayor.
RA: But he was always, but he was glad to have one of his employees, ah, Bill Barkley, serve as mayor. And in the legislature. But I don't think he expected Bill to give him any special treatment at all. I don't think he expected that. He was just a man that, he had a tremendous rapport with his staff down at his organization.
DS: What did Barkley do for Bonsall at Southwest?
RA: He ran the ah Union Oil...for Southwest Oil. He was a union oil man.
DS: Yeah, I though of him as in oil. So he wasn't in the mill at all?
RA: No, he was in Union Oil. They had their, they were separate and apart, they were...
DS: I knew Bill well. He was very, he became Speaker of the House. Now who else besides Bonsall?
RA: I, now, in other areas, I think another man was Frank Carter. I think he had a lot of ah, a lot of rapport.
DS: Was he a JP then?
RA: Yes.
DS: And he had run a men's clothing store when I was in school.
RA: Yes, he had a men's clothing store, before that he worked, he worked on the school, he was a school custodian.
DS: Is that right.
RA: Well maybe it was, I don't know whether it was before or after he run the men's clothing store, but he was, and I remember...Frank Carter was coming to work in the morning, dressed up like he was the superintendent. He took off his good clothes and put on his work clothes and go to work. Then after work that day he'd take a shower and dress up again and go home. But Frank was a good worker. But I think Frank had a real understanding for people, for down and out people. I think he had a real feel for those people. He'd had some tough going in his younger days. And I think a lot of people respected him, respected Frank a great deal. So in terms of, now you see he had certain influence in areas entirely separate than Harry Bonsall did. Harry had influence in terms of Chamber of Commerce...
DS: Rotary,
RA: Rotary,...Well I think another, if you think about it...
DS: Billy...
RA: ...Billy Jack. He was down at the University of Arizona.
DS: He came after I left I guess. Though his family was very instrumental in Glendale from before the turn of the century.
RA: He's not of that same family.
DS: He's not of that same family? Oh, I thought he was.
RA: No, he's not of that family.
DS: Oh, well I'm glad you straightened me out on that. Okay.
RA: No, he was not related to Lenny Jack, no. Now Lenny Jack, she was, in terms of women in the community...
DS: Yeah, she was the power. She started the Women's Club.
RA: Well, she was a, she was it. Yeah. Lenny Jack, she was something. Betty Lou was her daughter. And she had another daughter, what was the other one's name? I've forgotten, but anyway. Francis Jack, yeah. I think there may have been a boy or two in that family, there was, but I don't remember what their names were, but Bill was not that.
DS: Unusual that, I never knew anybody else with that name.
RA: Yeah. But Bill, I think, Bill, another man with quite a bit of influence and integrity...But obviously Harry Bonsall probably was number one, and I'd say Frank Carter was...and I think Harold Smith had quite a bit of rapport...particularly as related to school and education.
DS: Now Bill Ryan didn't hold the position that some editors did in town...
RA: No, Bill Ryan...
DS: Wonder why.
RA: Bill Ryan, well...
DS: Well, he drank too much.
RA: Well, yeah.
DS: I worked for Bill at that time.
RA: Yeah, you did, that's right.
DS: Forty-seven. Mm-hmm.
RA: Bill, you, ah, I had trouble sometimes trying to figure out whether he meant what he said a lot of times. At times I think Bill would say one thing but he was thinking something else. I don't know. Leah Cox was a...
DS: You think she had more power than Bill?
RA: Oh yeah, oh yes, yeah. Yeah, I don't think Bill had, huh I do, I guess you know you have little things that tip you off to certain things. Bill called me about just about the time school one day,...he said, "I haven't received any order yet for mimeograph paper." And ah, I said, "Do you sell mimeograph paper?" He said, "Yeah." I said, "Well, I didn't know that." He said, "I've been selling it to the school for years." I said, "How much a ream do..." I said, "What do you ask for your mimeograph paper?" "A dollar for a ream." "A dollar for a ream?" I said, "I've got some estimates from the school supply house in Phoenix and I can get it there for 83 cents a ream." And then he kind of blew up. He said, "Well," he said, "we're the taxpayers out here. We're paying to run that school and we think we ought to be entitled to its business." I said, "Well, in a competitive basis, your price is right, I'd would be more than happy to give you..." But I said, "You're not quoting a price that I can go to the board and tell them that that's where we should spend the taxpayers' money." And I think I got off on the wrong foot with Bill.
DS: He sold ah, he had the stationery store. We used to have to work in there after we got through with the newspaper.
RA: ...but I didn't realize that he'd been selling these school supplies. And I'd gotten ah, some quotations from PBSW, O. B. Marston, and maybe...supply or something. And so I think I made Bill mad. I didn't realize. I wouldn't have bought it from him anyway, but ah, if I would have known it sooner I would have given him a chance to bid. I didn't even send him a bid form. I didn't know that he supplied, really. And so Bill, Bill and I never did have the best relationship.
DS: Now Rennick was mayor just before you got there.
RA: I think so.
DS: He left in '45 I believe.
RA: As mayor?
DS: Yeah.
RA: I went there in '46. That'd be about right. And when I went there Mr. Rennick was about ready to retire. He was, Mr.Yelman said he'd already retired, but he hadn't. He was still on the payroll. And he was, he...But he wasn't really interested in teaching. He told me, he said, "As you grow older, your interests change." He said, "I've gotten to the point where I really don't get excited working with kids anymore." He said, "I'd much rather work with adults." And he wanted the business manager's job. And essentially, I think ah, the first year I was there, the second year I was there, I kind of moved him into that business manager's. I think maybe the first year. I lightened his class load and in fact I think he only taught one or two classes and then he was going to do the business for me. Take care of all the purchasing and this, that, and the other.
DS: Who was taking care of that before, the principal?
RA: Ah, well I think Mr. Yelman took care of it. Took care of all that.
DS: Amazing what the principals had to do in those days.
RA: Well, he...in other words he gave the business to Bill Ryan and gave...I made quite a few enemies right after, Mutt, I'd always...and the Whitney family. But Mutt had the school at Firestone and he had the Wilson Sporting Goods...(wife reminding him that this was going on tape) Well, I won't get into too many things. But anyway, Mutt was a good man. But Mutt had a little bit of the same opinion that Bill Ryan did. That inasmuch as he had a sporting goods store, he should get the sporting goods business. And my theory was that you should spend the taxpayers' money and get the greatest benefits you can from the dollars that you collect.
DS: Well, of course you were right. But they ah, there was a provincial attitude to shop in Glendale. I remember those big ads about "Shop In Glendale." Keep anybody from going to town.
RA: Yeah that's why, in fact that was just sort of a, a feeling that you should shop in Glendale. Well, I always wanted to shop in Glendale and I wanted to shop in Prescott too.
DS: Who were the organization that were the big, most important? Rotary I suppose, and Chamber?
RA: Chamber of Commerce became fairly good.
DS: Pardon me.
RA: Chamber of Commerce became a good organization after we employed an executive secretary. We employed a fellow by the name of Fred, I can't remember his name, but you've it there. But he was brought on a part-time basis. He never had any Chamber experience. But he'd...back in the Midwest or East somewhere. And ah, he came in on a part-time basis. But he was working full time. And he increased the membership so much, and the dues came in, we had, the Chamber had enough money that they put him on a full-time basis.
DS: About what year was that?
RA: Well, this must have been around '48, '49, somewhere in there. But they, but Fred had some health problems. That was one of the reasons he was in Arizona. He'd worked too hard back where he was. And he became, I guess it...still in Glendale, still there before '55. He'd had some real problems with his legs. Veins were giving out on him and ah, I think eventually he had one leg amputated. And ah, when he got ill, whoever was running, pretty much the power in the Chamber at that time decided they needed to get a full-time man. And so they let Fred go and they got somebody else...
DS: Who was mayor after Rennick? I have that record too, but I just wanted to know what you remembered about him?
RA: I don't remember who the mayor was.
DS: You know they shifted to the City Manager form of government in 1947...Bud Balkman. Remember him?
RA: Forty-seven, Bud Balkman.
DS: He was the first City Manager.
RA: The first City Manager.
DS: I remember that because he came in just before I got there. The Glendale News. And they paved all the streets just about that time, remember that?
RA: Yeah, yeah.
DS: Do you remember when they paved all the streets at one time? Every street that hadn't been paved was paved. And this was a national, in fact I wrote a national story for Public Works Magazine about it. That really tore up the town.
RA: ...Balkman, but he wasn't City Manager more than two or three years, was he?
DS: Not very long.
RA: And I don't remember who took over, but Stan Vanderpugh took over initially.
DS: Yeah, he came up as a policeman and then Police Chief.
RA: Yeah, that's right.
DS: Vanderpugh I think ranks as the outstanding City Manager in the history of the town. That was after you left.
RA: Yeah, he was a good Chief of Police, too. Now he was Chief of Police while I was there. And he was a good man.
DS: Now Chris Sheets, have you been ah chief...
RA: Chris Sheets ah...
DS: He was chief when I was in school.
RA: Oh, was he?
DS: Yeah.
RA: Chief of Police?
DS: His daughter, Barbara, was very...
RA: Well he wasn't on the police force while I was there.
DS: Is that right. He'd been fired once, and then was brought back. Remember Dick Witter came on as a judge.
RA: Yeah, he was a judge, Dick Witter came on about the time, well, I think when Frank Harden went in as JP, Dick Witter came in as City Manager didn't he?
DS: Mm-hmm, that's right.
RA: About that time.
DS: Yeah. I talked to him and to Irene Witter, his wife. Who were both with the city for many years, and then ah, Bernice Lucas Grog, remember her?
RA: Yeah, Bernice Lucas, I remember and then she married somebody.
DS: She was city clerk for many years.
RA: Yeah, she was ah, she ran the place there for a long time.
DS: That's right. Uh-huh.
RA: She was very good.
DS: Now who were the mayors you remember the most while you were there?
RA: Huh, I don't remember any of them. Barkley was.
DS: Yeah, Bill was.
RA: He was mayor several years. Ah, I remember...
DS: Who was the legislator from that area?
RA: Ahh,
DS: Glendale has never had any ah, a Congressman or a Governor well, technically. Ha, ha, ha.
RA: ...one gentlemen who was in the automobile business that became Governor.
DS: Well, strange, Glendale people don't think he had much to do with Glendale politics or operation.
RA: Naw, he didn't. I don't think he had much to do with anything, really...
DS: He didn't live in Glendale I don't think, did he?
RA: No. Ah, I'm looking down through the list here at some of the people that...Al...
DS: I talked to Al not long ago, he's still around.
RA: Is he still, is he still with the pharmecutical?
DS: No, he's retired.
RA: He's retired.
DS: He was with the State office.
RA: I saw him somewhere not too long ago and had a nice little visit with him.
DS: I want to ask you about black students at Glendale High. Now when I was at Glendale High there were no black students. They all had to go into Phoenix Colored School, which later became Carver. Now, was that a law or rule or just a custom?
RA: Well, let's put it this way. The state law was enacted requiring that elementary schools have a separate educational program for black students. That was mandatory at the elementary level. At the high school level, if there were a sufficient number of black students to constitute a school, the board could, but didn't have to, could have a separate school, and that's when Phoenix organized the Carver High School. And then of course we got this segragation problem come along following, well actually this thing began to come to a head during World War II when Roosevelt mandated that the black soldiers be given the same rights as the white soldiers. And ah, Harry Truman followed along with the same philosophy. And then it wasn't until we had the Brown vs. the Board of Education in Topeka, Kansas...
DS: 1954.
RA: Fifty-two or fifty-four? Ah that it became mandatory that we do away with segregated schools.
This is a continuation of our interview with Dr. Robert Ashe. We were speaking about black students.
RA: When I was in, first year I became Superintendent in Peoria, 1943, I had some black parents that came to me and wanted to have a place for their kids to be in school. And ah, there were only about three or four children involved, and we thought we'd accommodate them in the public schools right there in Peoria. However, within the next few days, I had a request from the Dysart School District. They said they had several black families that had moved out there to pick cotton, and they wanted to know if there wasn't some way we could put all of these black children together and put them in a school. We had a vacant schoolhouse out in Marionette, which was where they built that motel out in Sun City, that's where it stood. We had a brick building. Didn't have modern accommodations, had an outhouse, two outhouses. We had to haul water, we didn't have a well, we had to haul water for it, but anyway, here we were going to swamped with ah, we only had a few kids, but they had quite a number and they didn't have a room for them. They didn't have any space for them. And so we decided to put them all together and hire a teacher and have a one-room school for the black children. We didn't have any high school close. And so...
DS: Said state law mandated separate schools for elementary.
RA: For elementary, even at that time see. Ah, so we went ahead and I interviewed teachers. I had several...I won't go into that. But we had a, hired a teacher and had about 16 or 18 students out there, most of them were from the Dysart District. We had some from Peoria too. We operated that school for two years. We had so much trouble, the teacher had problems. The first year she was single, she had a car and it would break down. I'd get a phone call in the morning saying, "My car broke down, I can't get to school." And we'd have to get somebody out there to open that school. In fact I went out there an opened the school, started school several days. And so we decided, we had so many problems, we just decided we'd do away with that school at the end of the second year. And a lot of the students who were in the Dysart area moved away. So there weren't as many. And I told the families of the kids in our school, I said, "Put them on the school bus; send them right on into school. We'll take care of them." And we integrated them in the Peoria schools in 1945.
DS: Against the law then, huh?
RA: Against the law, but we didn't care. I mean, we just knew it was right. Well it so happens that when I went to Glendale, about the second or third year I was there, these families moved to Glendale. Now the kids were in high school. There were two brothers. They were, they were nice boys. And they came and wanted to go to high school, and we just signed them up. Said nothing to anybody about it, just signed them up. I didn't even consult the board on it. Just went ahead and enrolled them. And we never had any problems at all with those two. And eventually, I presume, there've been more since then, but I don't know. Cause Glendale didn't have many minorities except for the Spanish-American, they had a lot of them. But then, of course, when the law, desegragation...Phoenix Union High School did away with the Carver High School, and then they put all of those, they divided those teachers among all of the other schools. But that went over real good because they had a group of excellent teachers. They...
DS: They were good, yeah.
RA: They had a man named Robinson.
DS: Robinson, mm-hmm.
RA: Who would go back in the South and he would witness teachers teaching, and he picked out the good teachers and offered them a job. He could offer them more money than anybody in the South was offering. So he could get the choice, the pick of the lot. So those teachers who went into the Phoenix high schools then were well accepted as far as I know.
DS: They were dismayed at the time they decided to integrate cause they weren't sure they could get a job anymore.
RA: Yeah. But it was agreed that they would keep them, and ah, in fact I think there was some apprehension...Dr. Montgomery wasn't sure that, I'm not sure that he really like the idea of integrating them, but on the other hand, he decided that they had to do it. And Dr. Montgomery was getting old then. He was getting to where they wanted him to retire, but he didn't want to retire. Finally they, they set the date for him to retire. And then they had, they had a lot of turnover since then. See Mr. Jansen was Superintendent in Phoenix before Dr. Montgomery came.
DS: Oh yes, I remember that. He was Superintendent when Reg Manning was at school and they had that big fear about the yearbook. I don't know if you knew about that or not.
RA: Barry Goldwater was one, was a pupil there at Phoenix Union High School.
DS: Well Jansen asked Barry Goldwater to leave school and go somewhere else. Yes he did. That's why he went to military school.
RA: Yeah. Well anyway, as far as the black population was concerned, there wasn't many black people in the Glendale area. There, these families lived down south of the ice plant somewhere. I don't remember where they lived. I never did know where they lived.
DS: Mexicans were all grouped in one area down in the...
RA: Pretty much, southeast part of town.
DS: The Russians were out west.
RA: Russians were out west.
DS: The Japanese were ah,
RA: The Japanese were scattered...
DS: There were quite a few.
RA: Yeah, Japanese were scattered around...
DS: Quite a lot of those. And they harrassed them for quite a while. I don't know if you remember that or not.
RA: ...after the war?
DS: Before. Nineteen thirty-four and five they had a concerted to try to get them out of there.
RA: That was '34 and '35 huh? Well, I didn't know that. I know that Sarah Hardy was always friendly to the Japanese.
DS: Very...toward Japanese, mm-hmm.
RA: And she was ah, she would teach some of those priests the English language so that they could communicate with their people. They'd bring some of those Buddist priests over.
DS: Kids went to Japanese school after they finished their regular day.
RA: Yeah.
DS: They were all good kids, all good students. I don't know a single one that wasn't.
RA: Yeah, in fact if they weren't a good student, the families kept them out on the farm. They wouldn't let them go to school. Huh.
DS: There was, well the Tadadno boys...
RA: I was, I was in Peoria in 19, I went there in '40. Pearl Harbor came along in December of '41, and Bill...called me probably in April or May of '42 and wanted to know if there was any way that the Peoria schools could help educate some of the Japanese kids. Bill...at that time was president of the J.A.C.L. - Japanese-American Citizens League. And in order to get over to Peoria to talk to me, this is '41 ah, '42, it would have been in April or May of '42, in order to get there he couldn't go on the highway to Phoenix.
DS: They drew the line down Grand Avenue and across...
RA: He had to go north and had to go the back route. He couldn't cross Grand Avenue. He couldn't get on Grand Avenue. But he came over to see me, and I said, "How many students do you think you'll have?" He said, "Well," he said, "most of them will be juniors and seniors." He said, "I don't think they'll be over 15 or 20." I said, "Well, let me talk to the board, and we'll see. Let me talk to the Superintendent and we'll talk to the board and see what they say." So we took it up to the board meeting and we had just three board members - Howard Cook, Bill McFredericks, and Pat Coor, and all of them had boys in the service. In fact, Bill McFredericks had already lost one son who was flying fighter, fighter planes over Europe, over Germany, shot down. Uh, but, they all asked the question, "Are these kids citizens of the United States?" I said, "They were all born here." And by definition, anybody born in the United States is a citizen, period. And they said, "Well, if they're citizens, they're entitled to go to school. And if the other schools, Phoenix schools and Glendale schools can't take them, we ought to, we ought to help them." They all had that. And then the next question was, "How do we make this break? Do we tell the community, do we ask the community, or do we just do it? What do we do?" And I can remember very vividly, we had a very active Kiwana's Club, we just organized one in Peoria, we had an active Chamber of Commerce, had an active Women's Club. I said, "Shouldn't we go and talk to these people about it?" And Pat Coor was very adamant. He said, "Don't tell anybody." He said, "Just tell the kids to show up here the first day of school and take care of them."
DS: You just start a controversy if you do.
RA: That's right. And Scottsdale had asked the parents. And they really rose up in arms and Scottsdale schools couldn't take them. And I think, I'm sure whether Tempe's high was able to take any or not. Mesa might've had some, I'm not sure. But, first day of school, I decided I should've at least let the faculty know about these kids. So we called an early faculty meeting at 8 o'clock, and I informed the faculty about it. I guess we had a faculty meeting the day before. I told them about it. I called a student council meeting early that meeting to inform them what was going to happen. I said, "We're going to have some Japanese students here on campus." I said, "We're going to let them enroll." And I wanted them to be sure to treat them friendly and be as good to them as they could. And ah, but before, even before I had my student council meeting the kids were arriving on campus. They got there before 8 o'clock. They wanted to get enrolled. We told them to come at nine, see, but they came at 7:30 some of them. We had 42.
DS: Forty-two.
RA: Forty-two.
DS: From all over the west valley.
RA: From all over, yes, from all, some of them had been going to high school in Tolleson. Some of them, most of them in Glendale, north Phoenix...
DS: Glendale didn't ah, kick anybody out, did they?
RA: Well they couldn't, they couldn't go to Glendale.
DS: Well Ernie Kahutsu was there, in fact he was elected Cardinal King and raised big furor.
RA: What year?
DS: Forty-two.
RA: In '42?
DS: Forty-two.
RA: Did he graduate in '42?
DS: Probably.
RA: They drew the line on April 1, 1942. That's when they had the meeting. April 1. And so all those kids in Glendale and Tolleson and other places, they had to get out of their school April 1. They couldn't go back across that line.
DS: Well I elected Ernie, and there was such a furor in the town that he resigned. Which was kind of sad.
RA: Yeah. Well, but he had to, he had, Kohutsu
DS: He'd always had his kids in Glendale High School.
RA: But ah, we got those kids, none of them were able to finish high school where they were because they pulled out on April 1. And so we had, Mrs. Hardy was the person in the Glendale High School faculty that was most willing to cooperate and help. And we had our teachers correspond, sometimes by phone, sometimes by mail, with the teachers in Glendale. Found out what they had to do to complete the previous year's work see. Those kids had done quite well up until April 1 and then they had to drop out. And so we arranged for those kids to finish their high school, you might say working with the teachers in Peoria with the help of the Glendale teachers. And ah, I think in that first graduating class, class of '43, they probably had 12 or 15 seniors who were Japanese that year. We had, I think we had four Tunita boys, we had Tom,...Suzuki,
DS: Were they treated alright?
RA: Oh yeah. We had no problem at all. There was only one, huh, we only had one little incident the whole year that I knew about...but I remember some of the students came in to see me one day and they wanted to know what we could do with a guy that ran a cafe downtown. Ah, they had taken ah, one of our students, I've forgotten what his, they always called him, the kids sort of nicknamed Hirihito or something. They nicknamed him. He was sort of an onry little devil. His name was Hero Okomiashi. And his brothers had a farm, oh, I would say about lateral 19-1/2 and P Avenue in there somewhere. And he had some older brothers running the farm. And Hero had been going to Glendale, but ah, he had to come Glendale.
DS: I didn't notice. I didn't know they had to leave Glendale.
RA: Oh yeah. Yeah. Most of them were from Glendale. We had some real fine students. Real good students. Ah, but some of the Peoria kids went downtown with Hero, Hirihito, and they sat down at the counter in the cafe next to Pat's Barber Shop and they ordered a sandwich and something to drink, soda pop or something, but the cook came out of the kitchen. And he saw that Japanese kid there, and he came out with a cleaver. He came out of the kitchen and he started after him, this kid. The kid was smart enough to get out of there. And they all left.
DS: How about that.
RA: And ah, they came to me complaining about the action that cook. I said, "Well," I said, "I can't" I said, "I certainly don't stick up for the cook. On the other hand, when Hirihito came here, when Hero came here, he was told that he was not to cross Grand Avenue." He knew that and he should never have gone downtown. In fact none of the Japanese people would ever go downtown. They drove their own cars, but they never went down...But he did, cause he was with these other kids, these Anglos. But I didn't stick up for the cook. But on the other hand I didn't stick up for Hero either. Cause he was doing something he shouldn't have been doing. Say look, "If Hero'd been doing what he should have been doing, he wouldn't have had any of that problem."
DS: Tough times. Can you imagine what it would be like to have, just you were your race, just because you were who you were.
RA: But that was the only incident that we had. I never, Hero was one, he would ditch once in awhile with these Anglos. And I'd get after him. One time I suspended him for, well, for a few days, two or three days I think. And I, one requirement was that he bring his parents back to talk to me before he got back in school. Well his parents didn't speak English, but his brothers did. And so one of the brothers came back with him a couple days later and I told him exactly what Hero was doing. He was late to class, he was ditching classes, he just wasn't...
DS: That's unusual for a Japanese.
RA: Yeah, well it is. He was an unusual type. You couldn't help but like the kid. On the other hand he was onry, he was an onry little devil. And the brother listened and shake his head...I think I kicked him out for a week, but in the meantime I said somebody better come back here and talk to me before you come back see. So his brother came in two or three days, a couple of days after I'd kicked him out. He still had some time to spend outside of school. And ah, when the brother left, he said, "I don't think you're going to have any more trouble with Hero." I said, "What makes you think so?" He says, "Hero doesn't like to operate that tractor." And he said, "If he can't come to school, he's going to be on that tractor at daylight in the morning, and he'll be on that until dark at night." And he said, "I don't think you'll have any more trouble with Hero." And we didn't have. But they don't believe in kids going to school and messing around. They want them to study.
DS: I want to change the subject a little bit. You had at your time, a lot of future journalists going through Glendale High School. Now would you credit Al Levin for that?
RA: Well I think so, yes. We had...
DS: Tell me about him. How'd you get him...
RA: Huh.
DS: It's Levin, isn't it?
RA: A-L-V-I-N L-E-V-I-N. That name is pronounced, back in Baltimore, it's pronounced (Laveen).
DS: Hmm.
RA: But when he came to me, I didn't know what, I called him Levin. He stopped in my office on a Saturday morning before school started on a Monday.
DS: What year would that have been?
RA: Nineteen forty-six.
DS: At Glendale High School?
RA: At Glendale High School. When I went to Glendale, I had the responsibility of hiring, I needed ah, six teachers. I called the placement bureau in Tempe, at U of A, and Flagstaff. There were no teachers available. I sent notices to at least eleven placement agencies outside the State of Arizona. Colorado, California, New Mexico, several, all over.
DS: Great time to be a teacher, huh?
RA: I got one, one applicaion from Colorado. A lady that wrote and said that she would like the job. I listed the job we had. She wanted an English job. She said she, she knew that she could handle the job, she had taught for sixteen years, and each year was in a different school. Well, I didn't want her. But anyway, Saturday morning before school started, he walks in, walks up and he wondered if there was any chance that we had a job open. And we still hadn't hired the full faculty. I'd hired Tilly Lao, did you know Tilly? Tilly Lao was an English teacher. She was an older person. And I'd assigned her Journalism. She didn't want it, but she said she'd teach it. Along with some English. But she didn't want the Journalism, but she'd take it in order to get the job. Another requirement was that I'd help her find a house. I'd help her find a house then...Levin walked in, and he had taught Journalism and English back in the Baltimore High, a Baltimore high school for two or three years. A young man, had a wife who had asthma, and the doctors thought the dry climate in Arizona would be good for her. They had one baby, one little girl just a year old I think. And I, I needed another teacher. I didn't even have enough teachers.
DS: Was he qualified?
RA: Ah, he was a graduate, yes. He'd had training back at the university there back in Baltimore. I've forgotten which one it was now. Yes, he was qualified. So I sent him down to the state, that is he couldn't...it was Saturday morning. I said, "You're going to have to go down and..." I think he'd already been down and found out that he had enough ah, he had everything except the Arizona Constitution...They always gave you a year to get that. But he qualified. I said, "You come to work Monday morning, and I'll give you a Journalism class and some English II or III." I don't remember what it was. But I think I fit him up with four, he had four class periods a day. Then he had publication. He had a newspaper and the annual. So they only had four, I think he only taught four hours a day. And Al was the one that sort of got these kids interested in Journalism. Yeah, we had several there. We had Hugh Harrelson and ah, Jerry Eaton.
DS: Jerry Eaton, mm-hmm. The Rich kids.
RA: George Rich. George and...yeah. Jerry Jackal went into photography, but Levin got him started in that. And Jerry's wife was in, she'd done some writing, and ah, the boy that was from Mayer, Herbie Serrat.
DS: Herbie Serrat on UPI.
RA: Yeah. These were some of the people that ah...
DS: They were all Levin students?
RA: Levin students, yeah. I mean he was more or less...
DS: I missed him. They ah, Journalism when I was there was just sort of handed to whoever was available.
RA: Well, whoever would take it.
DS: ...T. B. Schwartz.
RA: Yeah, T. B. Schwartz. He was a nice guy.
DS: Did you know him?
RA: Yeah, I met him. In fact, he was leaving, he was leaving see. And he got a job in California somewhere. He left. But I got...before he left. He's a nice guy.
DS: A little, round man.
RA: Yeah, he's really roly poly. But Levin came and ah, I told Levin, I said, "I can't promise you a job because the board, only the board can hire." I said, "We're not going to have a board meeting until next Wednesday." But I said, "You come Monday morning and I'll put you to work. And you fill out this application." And he filled out the application. And I didn't have any papers on him or anything else. I did make a phone call back to somebody back in Baltimore and they said he was a good teacher. And he came and started teaching. The first three days everything seemed to be going good, and so I met the board Wednesday night at the board meeting and I said, "I'm recommending," he was one, I think there maybe were one or two others I was recommending that they employ. And I remember Sam Joy looked at that name, and he says, he says, "Is this guy a Jew?" Yeah. I said, "I don't know whether he's Jewish or not." I said, "I don't really know." I said, "Look on the application there." I said, "There's a place there that asks religious preference see."
DS: And they had that on...
RA: And so he looked on there, but Levin hadn't put anything in there, he left it blank, see.
DS: He learned.
RA: I said, "I don't know whether he's Jewish or not." But ah, I said, "I don't care." I said, "He's in the classroom, he's doing a good job first three days."
DS: Did Joy care?
RA: Well listen. When I went to Glendale, they didn't have a Jew on the faculty. If they had a Catholic it was...he was the only one I think. They just didn't employ. They didn't have any Spanish-Americans.
DS: Only one Mormon I think. That was O. W. Allen.
RA: O. W. Allen was the Mormon. Oh, we got one or two more later. Mormons are something different. But anyway, that school was a WASP school.
DS: I'll say it was.
RA: And that's just the way...(whispering) yeah, most of them were, but that one particularly was just sort of run that way.
DS: No Hispanic teachers there at all.
RA: No, none. I hired the first Hispanic, I hired some Catholics. And of course...is a strong nation, and ah, I don't know why. Masonic Order, they, they didn't like the black people.
DS: Or Catholics.
RA: And they didn't like Catholics, see. So you kind of, there were a lot of that kind of feeling going around in the community.
DS: I was shocked to find out that B. B. Moore was an awful bigot. Did you know that? In fact, he was in the Klan for awhile. Yeah. And he said something about, "They'll never have niggers in school with my kids."
RA: Well, that was a public high.
DS: Rather general feeling.
RA: Well, even in Glendale, they had a Ku Klux Klan organization there. In fact, I think, VanCamp's the one that told me about some people belonging to the Klan.
DS: Well almost everybody in Tempe belonged to that. I have the records books, so.
RA: Yeah. You got it all set up, huh. But it, yeah, okay. But Levin did a nice job, and then when it came time to evaluate teachers and recommend for the next year, I recommended he be reemployed. And the board members, one of the commented, said, "Well, when they made him, they threw away the cast, the mold." But, sort of excusing their prejudice away. Well, this guy's different. But he was with us three years I guess.
DS: Is that all.
RA: Only three years.
DS: Why did he leave?
RA: Well, he ah, he did make quite a contribution. He would go into the senior problem classes, and we had, we had some outstanding teachers. John Kerner was a very outstanding, did you know John Kerner?
DS: He wasn't there when I was there.
RA: He came after you. But John Kerner was an outstanding senior problems teacher.
DS: What's senior problems?
RA: Well, that's political...it's a social studies, it's a social studies. But one of the problems was racial and religious predjudice and that type of thing. And Kerner would get Levin to come in with his skull cap, what do you call it,...and his...shawl and talk to him about his religion.
DS: He practiced it though.
RA: He practiced it. He's not too faithful, but he practiced it. And ah, that...you couldn't help but like him...he was rather pointed at times. But I gave, I gave the faculty quite a bit of freedom in doing things. One of the things that the Chamber of Commerce was upset about was that Glendale wasn't getting enough publicity in the paper, in the Phoenix papers. And I said, I said, and they got somebody to come out from the Phoenix...
This is a continuation of the Robert Ashe interview.
RA: was upset because Glendale wasn't getting enough publicity. And, finally I was, I don't know if I was president that year, I was on the board of directors anyway, I suggested maybe we get our Journalism teacher to see if we couldn't generate some stories, Levin was a photographer also, he'd done some pool work. And so they said they'd pay him so much a line, so much an inch for copy, and they'd pay him for his pictures that they could use. So, Levin started ah, writing...
DS: Got his own newsgirl, huh?
RA: Started...so to speak. And he was making $75 - $100 a month. That's darn good money back in those days. Just from the Republic, from the things that he said in the paper. And some of the stuff he sent in was not stuff that I would particularly send in, but he did. Because it had, it was newsworthy. In other words, people would read it. That's what the paper's for. One of them was ah, you know we had those pep stories, pep girls, pep squad, what do they call themselves. Pom-pom girls, I don't know. But in their initiation they made those girls who were going to come into their club, they made them wear funny garments. And one day, three of the girls, part of the initiation, they carried ah, pep cereal, Kellogg's Pep Cereal. And whenever they would meet, see one of them, they'd have to reach in and grab some cereal and eat it. This was the kind of thing. And he caught two of those girls and Levin took their picture holding up their pep cereal boxes and he wrote a story about this damn thing. In the Arizona Republic. Not only did it get in the Republic, it was picked up and printed several places around the country. He got a letter from the, somebody from the Kellogg...
DS: ...
RA: Yeah, and they were happy to know that the girls like the Kellogg's product and so forth. Glad to hear about the story. But I mean, that's the kind of, he'd stick...
DS: He was a hustler. Yeah.
RA: He was a hustler, and he would get, if they had something going on at the Chamber, he'd go down and learn enough about it and ask a few questions and write a story and send it in. And Levin could write rapidly. He didn't waste a lot of time.
DS: Who was supposed to be covering? They always had Glendale reporters...
RA: Well, at that time...
DS: Thelma Heatwole had started by that time I think.
RA: She was with the ah
DS: She was a Herald.
RA: Thelma was with the Herald most of the time. It was after I left that she left the Herald and went with the Republic, or about the time I left I think. But ah, I think that Earl Kazar, who was sort of running the paper boys out in that area, he was responsible for...just like this guy up here...name of Smith here in Prescott. He writes a few stories for the Republic. I think he runs it. He's in charge of the distributorship mainly I think. But anyway, Levin, he started picking up pretty good money on that. So the Chamber got, Glendale got a lot of publicity out of it. We had, one day I got a phone call from the principal out at Phoenix Union High School, I believe it was the principal, it might have been from the District office, asking me if we could take care, could serve as the host for a couple of German educators who were over here to study American schools. They were having faculty meetings or something, and they didn't think the educators would be very interested in seeing what was going on in Phoenix schools that day. I said, "Sure, send them on out. We'd be glad to." And they came out the next morning and I introduced them to some of our students and assigned, I guess I used some of Levin's students really, there, darned Journalist students were running around all over anyway. I let them take them around to visit the classes and take them to shops and answer questions for them. In fact, they went down into the Journalism office, we had that down in the basement, and ah, while they were down there, the editor of the Cardinal Highlights or whatever the Cardinal paper was called,
DS: That's right, Cardinal Highlights.
RA: Anyway, went down there and the editor, a young lady, I don't remember which one it was, she was sitting there, and one educator was leaning over her right shoulder and the other on the left, and Levin took the picture and then they wrote a story. And they wrote quite a lot, he had quite a long story on this thing. Column...maybe a column that long. On these educators and some of the things, how our schools compared to the German schools, just a few of these things. He put a lot of stuff in that. And he got that picture in the paper the next morning and got that in the Phoenix paper the next morning. E. W. Montgomery, meeting with his principals, I guess it was that Friday afternoon or sometime the same week. And oh he was upset, he was mad. Cause they had gone to so much trouble in getting a lot of things about these two guys, getting all ready for a big news story for the Phoenix paper, see,
DS: And Levin scooped them, huh.
RA: And Levin scooped them. And they took their story down and the paper said, "This is not news. This is old stuff. We've already printed." But he'd get things like that, see. And
DS: Why did he leave?
RA: Why? I think it, mainly because of family. His wife's family always wanted them to stay back there. And ah, when he went back there, he started working for his father-in-law. His father-in-law was an auctioneer. And he told me about the way he worked for his father-in-law. But he couldn't get along with his father-in-law. He didn't like the way his father-in-law operated. The father-in-law would send him over to talk to one of the judges, and he'd put several $20 bills in a white envelope and he'd seal it with no name or anything on it, and he'd say, "You take this over and give it to Judge so-and-so." And the father-in-law, the judges would assign who would take care of the auctioning of some of the estates where people would die and they got to auction off their stuff. And so the way the father-in-law got his business was by, bribing them. He didn't like that. And another thing that really upset him was after his father-in-law, after he went back there to work with his father-in-law, his father-in-law would go out and buy, he would go buy a whole house full of furniture. Everything. And then they'd take it all down to the store and sort it out and decide whether to sell it or give it away or what to do with it. But they had one house they got furniture in, they got a trunk up in the attic. It was filled with postage stamps, old postage stamps. And his father-in-law put Al to work on those postage stamps, sorting them all out, getting them all organized, and when they finally got through with those postage stamps, I think that they sold that collection of postage stamps for better than $10,000, which is three times as much as they paid for everything in the house. And the father-in-law said thanks to him, but he never gave him, didn't give him any money for it at all. He paid almost minimum wages to him.
DS: Did he come out for his health? Or what did he come out here anyway?
RA: Came out for his wife's, well, tell you the truth, he came out cause he got mad at his father-in-law. I think. He got fed up with the way they were treating him back there.
DS: But he did go back after three years.
RA: Then he went back, yeah. Things change. You know you leave.
DS: Now to conclude our discussion Dick, when you left Glendale in 1955, right, you went over to the faculty at Arizona State. Now, you had seen some changes in town at that time, and this was on the verge, you might say, when the growth of Glendale really started. Did you see signs of that as you were leaving?
RA: Oh yes. In fact, ah, even when we started proposing we have second and third high schools, we told the community that we should expect to have several more high schools because there's no question about it, growth was coming because Glendale and the Washington area was the, local, logical location for growth in particular with I-17 going in. It was the, just the undisputable area in which growth was going to take place. I was there nine years, and we probably, I would judge that our high school enrollment, the year I left we had probably about probably 1,000 in Glendale and we probably had about 800 or 900 in Sunnyslope, and when we opened the Washington school I think we had pretty close to 500 the first year in Washington. And since I've left there, they built six more high schools.
DS: I think there are nine now.
RA: There are nine now, okay. Yeah, so we saw the growth coming, but ah, of course no one could exactly, I don't think we understood exactly how the growth would take place. And I think since then we've realized that a larger percentage of our population would be retired people, and that there'd be retirement homes being built. See, we didn't have retirement homes back in those days. Oh, there were...
DS: And never a hotel. Isn't that something?
RA: Yeah.
DS: Glendale still doesn't have a big hotel.
RA: Ah, wasn't, wasn't there one hotel across the street from where the post office used to be?
DS: Oh they had little hotels...
RA: Olive Hotel, wasn't that the Olive Hotel?
DS: That was in Tempe, but there was a Glenwood and there was a
RA: Glenwood, the Glenwood, yeah...been torn down.
DS: But I'm talking about there was no...
RA: Oh no, nothing big.
DS: There wasn't a Camelback or a San Marcos or anything like that.
RA: And even when they started building ah tourist, border home courts,...he had a few...not first class. No, and then there's the one where, there's still one there, I don't know what they call it now.
DS: But ah, one thing that's always puzzled me, is that the west side always seemed to lag about ten years behind the east side. What do you think the reason for that was? Ah, that was one thing, hotels, another was artistically. I'm sure you noticed that.
RA: Yes.
DS: Ah, what was the reason?
RA: Well I think part of the lag was the fact that it was very much of an agricultural community for so long, and a lot of the people in that area like the Japanese farmers and the Russian farmers and so forth, were not ah, active participants in community organizations and so forth. And I don't know why, but ah, you might say they lagged. There were a lot of good people there.
DS: It's finally coming now. It's just now beginning. Marie Sands has done a lot in the art field.
RA: Yeah.
DS: Do you know her?
RA: Oh yes.
DS: Yeah, uh-huh, and various other people. But there isn't a little gallery over there of any kind that I know of. And strangely enough there isn't a daily newspaper on the whole west side...On the east side every town has one. This puzzles me. Why this huge difference.
RA: How many newspapers do they have now? They have weeklies...In Glendale, Glendale.
DS: There's one weekly, the Star.
RA: Star. Just the one?
DS: Just the one. I was just over interviewing the publisher last, two weeks ago. But he publishes about, or prints about eight newspapers.
RA: Yeah.
DS: From one shop.
RA: You see, the whole economy's changed. Ah, a hundred years ago who ever thought of anybody having as many as eight newspapers? But it became such that if you bought the equipment to do your publishing, you might as well publish several at the same time. And we saw this coming on back in well, the late 50's and early 60's. There wasn't any way to predict some of these things. Of course, Pulliam came out and took over two papers. But he didn't try to put up...in the various communities like some publishers have done.
DS: No.
RA: I don't know. I can't give you an answer to that. I don't know why.
DS: There isn't a symphony orchestra in Glendale. This is the fourth largest city in the state. And you wonder, ah, even Gilbert has a symphony, Chandler has a symphony. Tempe. Mesa. Scottsdale. They all have community symphony orchestras. I'm just puzzled as to the reason.
RA: Well I don't know. I don't know the reason. But it's a conservative community. And ah, people.
DS: They're very proud of Saguaro Ranch Park. Had they started that before you left?
RA: Is that the one out north?
DS: Right next to the community college.
RA: No, that came on later. Yeah, that hadn't been.
DS: You're thinking of Thunderbird Park.
RA: Yeah, I'm thinking about Thunderbird Park, yeah. We (wife: you did some work on developing of Thunderbird Park) Have we done more on that Thunderbird Park? Have we done quite a bit out there? We haven't been out there, never.
DS: I think is sort of...
RA: ...sort of dying on the vine?
DS: Well, it hasn't moved as fast as they thought, but the Saguaro Ranch Park has developed...the city owns it and it was the old Bartlett Saguaro Ranch.
RA: Yeah, yeah, Saguaro Ranch, yeah.
DS: And they, part of it is the new library, the city library on the north side, and the community college is on the south side. And then...is where the historical society is. So it's, there's a lot of activity out there. It's near Olive and ah 59th Avenue. But that, boy that ten miles north of town, there, along 59th is really something. They've got, ah, of course the Graduate School of International Management, they've got Ironwood High School, they've got the hospital.
RA: Thunderbird Hospital.
DS: And finally, out at the end is Arrowhead Ranch which is a, now that's sort of stalled too, but ah, that's a ten miles that has really, it's amazing to see...
RA: Now, when I was in high school there, we used to go out north of the canal, out on the desert and hunt rabbits. There wasn't anything out there then.
DS: Reverend Tuckey tells about capturing wild horses and donkeys out there where the Graduate School is right now. Now you were in school with Bert Fireman.
RA: Well, Bert finished the year before I...
DS: That's right, he was a year ahead of you. You and Thelma were in the same class.
RA: And I only went to Glendale one year, my senior year.
DS: So you didn't know Bert in high school.
RA: No, cause Bert was ah, kind of a guy, you always knew Bert Fireman was around somewhere. He was a big guy and he'd be around school. His sister was in Bob's class.
DS: I never knew her.
RA: I...what her name was. Gertrude, Gertrude, Gertrude Fireman. She was a good student.
DS: Now they had Sam Fireman's grocery.
RA: Yeah.
DS: And they were the only Jewish people in town that I knew. There'd been a Newman family before that.
RA: Well, the...
DS: Sorta, they had been Jewish. But they had to go to Phoenix to the
RA: To the synagogue.
DS: I don't whether Glendale has a synagogue yet. Ah, I don't think so.
RA: I don't know, I really don't know. But then they got, quite a few Jewish came into the community...some of them were...
DS: Would you say it was a Wasp community?
RA: Oh yeah, yeah. I think, trying to think of the name of the man that ah had a clothing store right across from Lukins Pharmacy there. Hmmm, the name's in here somewhere. RV, no, hmmm.
DS: Well, to summarize then, I do need to wind this up, ah, you saw then that they were on the threshold in '55 when you left.
RA: ...
DS: But they really hadn't started annexing yet according to the records.
RA: No, I don't know whether that related to requiring that the laws be changed...I don't know the details on that.
DS: It wasn't until they annexed about half of Maryvale in 1960-61 that it really got started.
RA: It got started then.
DS: That was the big hunk that they...all at one time.
RA: And the same thing about the growth of Phoenix. You know, it was just a small community geographic-wise. And now it's spread out, I don't know how many square miles it includes, but a big territory now.
DS: Well I was amazed, Glendale is, it was ten miles west clear out to Luke and ten miles north out to Arrowhead Ranch. And Peoria's in the middle.
RA: Yeah, we just came back from California and came by way of Barstow and Kingman, six miles before we got to Barstow we saw the signs, Barstow City Limits. Still just desert. Nothing but desert. We went another two or three miles before we came on any houses.
DS: So you feel the kinship...went to school there, you principaled there, superintendent for a long time. So you still have a lot of friends over there?
RA: Well I think, we, yes, we don't see them as much as we, I'd say most of our friends now are former students. A lot of the people that were friends of ours when we were there are now gone.
DS: You moved to Prescott in what year?
RA: We went to, we went to Tempe in '55, and then we came up here in '82.
DS: So you've been up here almost ten years.
RA: It will be nine years in September. So we're beginning to feel like Prescott is home now.
DS: I'm sure you are. Bob, I want to thank you, ah, I'm sure the tape will be an addition to the library there at the Glendale Historical Society, and thanks a lot.
This is the end of the interview with Robert Ashe.

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INTERVIEW OF DR. ROBERT ASHE
This is Dean Smith, speaking to Dr. Robert Ashe is Prescott on May 29, 1991.
DS: Bob, you came to Glendale in what, '45?
RA: 1946.
DS: '46. As Superintendent of the high school.
RA: July 1, 1946.
DS: But you had been in Glendale a long time before that, in the area.
RA: Oh, we lived in Glendale in 1930, '31 when I was a senior in high school. I graduated from high school about the first of June, 1931.
DS: From Glendale High.
RA: Glendale High, then fifteen years later I went back as Superintendent of the District. When I went back there were still seven teachers there that'd been there when I was there.
DS: Is that right. Do you remember who they were?
RA: Well I think I can name some of them. ...Rauch, H. L. Renick, Sarah ..., Winifred Smith, ...Weiss, uh, Carey.
DS: Oh, Carey's dead, yeah. How bout Gale Van Camp?
RA: Yeah, Gale Van Camp.
DS: He wasn't on the faculty.
RA: No, he wasn't on the faculty, but he was a very influential member on the campus.
DS: That's right, mm-hmm.
RA: He was there before Mr. Yelman in fact. I think Gale Van Camp started working for the school district as early as 1920, and he was the head custodian. I relied on Van Camp for a lot of information and a lot of counseling 'cause Van was a man who could listen and didn't have to talk all of the time. But when you'd ask him was to size things up, he would be willing to make his judgment known. Yes, I appreciated him very much. He was a very fine man. He was a good, a good employee. He was very loyal to the school district, he was loyal to the staff. Very cooperative, and if he didn't think something was quite right, he didn't hesitate to say so, but if you overruled him, that was alright. In other words, he didn't hold it against you at all. When I went there the district had just started growing, right after World War II. And my predecessor, Mr. Yelman, had indicated one of the things we had to do was to look forward to making to doing to do some more building to take care of the student body. I don't remember exactly the number of students, I think there were around 650 students. But I went there in 1946, and the school was growing at about 100 students per year, maybe a little more than that. And so we had to start thinking about additional school facilities.
DS: Had you added Sunnyslope by that time?
RA: No, Sunnyslope came about following a study that we had made by the professors at the University of Southern California. They recommended that we build a school in the Sunnyslope area. And they said that we should build one in the Washington area. Because of our growth. It was very evident that the growth was going to continue and evan increase in numbers, and it did. I think we opened the school in Sunnyslope in 1950, and then, even the Sunnyslope proposition was not a particularly popular one in the Glendale area. A lot of the people in Glendale thought that if we built a school in Sunnyslope it would prevent drawing the people from the Sunnyslope area to the Glendale area for their marketing. Thought they wouldn't come over and patronize the stores. Well, as a matter of fact, they weren't coming over anyway. They were going to Phoenix for their shopping. And ah, it was not a very popular issue to build the Sunnyslope High School. But the people in Glendale approved it, as did the people in the district.
DS: Well Sunnyslope was in Phoenix then wasn't it?
RA: Yeah, it was in the city, it was in the city limits of Phoenix, yes.
DS: Was then.
RA: It was then too, well, not, I think it was.
DS: Well that's a long way from Glendale High School. I drove it just the other day, and its ah
RA: Nine miles.
DS: Is it nine miles?
RA: About nine miles, approximately.
DS: That's quite a ways for two schools in the same district isn't it?
RA: Well, yes. Quite a ways, quite a ways to transport those kids. We had quite a number of buses running over there transporting those students.
DS: And some came from east of Sunnyslope High, so they went even further.
RA: Yes. But Sunnyslope, ah, our district boundaries went as far as, I think it's 16th Street on the east side.
DS: Yeah, see, that's quite a way east.
RA: Yes. And of course they went out north to Bell Road, so there's a lot of area there where the race track is now. That was developed, it was developed before I went to Glendale, just about that time. But ah, we figured that by building the high school in Sunnyslope we could cut down on some of the transportation problems with transporting students. But when we got ready to go with the high school in the Washington area, the people in the district voted against it. Voted it down, not a great, not a fantastic margin, but it was voted down rather decisively. The people in the Washington area blamed themselves because they didn't really get their group out to vote. And they wanted the board to call an election for another chance to build the Washington High School. The board said, "Look, we have called one election. We did what we thought was right; the people said no. We don't feel that we should put the pressure on them again." And so the people in the Washington area got a petition out and petitioned for an election. And they proposed the terms of the election in the same, using the same wording that the board had proposed, and of course the board had no alternative but to, they had to accept it, call the election. Call for an election. Well in that election the board did not go out and actively support the bond issue. They were not opposed to it, they were in favor of it, but because it was voted down the first time they just didn't feel like it was proper for them to go out and push it.
DS: When was that first election?
RA: Well, it must have been about 195...it was probably 1954.
DS: I have a record of it so I can check.
RA: Yeah, you probably have a record of it. It was not many months later that the people of the district petitioned for another election, and that had to be held in a specified time, and of course advertised and all that. But the people in the Washington area were the ones that were really pushing it. And they set up what they called "coffee clutches." And they asked, they got their parents together of the students, and they elected their own leaders, I don't even remember who the leaders were. But they elected their leaders, and they asked their parents to, or couples to invite four or five of their neighbors in to talk about the bond issue. And they put out a one page fact sheet. They just called it FACTS. And they decided they would not ask these people to vote for the bond issue, but they would merely bring them together and explain the facts about the growth of the district and the inadequate housing and ask them to, they asked each of them within a matter of three to five days to have a "coffee clutch" in their own home and invite other people who hadn't been invited yet. And this thing spread, not just in the Washington area, but spread into Glendale. I remember Dr. Wright, a dentist, his wife was rather active in some of the circles, and they invited some people in in the Glendale area to have coffee at their house. And later he said, "You know, I didn't realize that this thing was so unpopular." he said. "I don't think of anybody that came to that meeting that acted to me like they were going to vote for that." We said, "We didn't ask them to vote for it, but we didn't ask for them to vote against it either."
DS: Why were they against it?
RA: Well, same reason, they anticipated that it would increase their taxes. And of course some people just didn't believe that Glendale was growing like it was. They just couldn't believe that. And they though we were joking when we said we'd have to go on double sessions. Well before we got finished with the high school built, we had to go on double sessions. We actually started classes as early as six o'clock in the morning, and we had some students coming between six and twelve; we had all the sophomores, now all the juniors and seniors were scheduled for morning classes. All the freshmen were scheduled for afternoon classes, and the sophomores, we divided them, so that half of them came in the morning and half in the afternoon. And the reason was that we needed ten classes of biology and we had only one classroom. So we had two teachers teaching biology; one of them in the morning and one in the afternoon. Each with a full load. But we had only one classroom. And so we were really crowded that year. But really, it was a good year. The teachers that taught in the morning, they liked that cause they had all afternoon free. Those who were late risers, they liked that afternoon session. And so, some teachers had to teach both morning and afternoon.
DS: Both were held at the Glendale High School.
RA: That was at Glendale High School.
DS: That was before you got Sunnyslope finished.
RA: That was before we had, before we were able to move into Sunnyslope.
DS: Now let me ask you an obvious question. Why was the Glendale District so large in the first place? It extended from east Phoenix clear to the west Valley.
RA: You have to remember that the Glendale Union High School District I think, was organized in 19, I believe it was 1912, I may be wrong on that date. It would be in the history.
DS: I have that too. The school
RA: Maybe 1910
DS: 1910, because the school was finished in 1912.
RA: Okay, 1910 was when they had the election. And I believe the man who they employed to start with was B. H. Scudder, who later moved to Tempe. And B. H. Scudder was also superintendent up in Jerome when they built Jerome High School...and he had three daughters, three daughters, and all of them were teachers. And B. H. Scudder was a, he was sort of a trader, a horse trader. And while he was in Glendale, I think Van Camp told me some of the stories about B. H. Scudder. Said if somebody had a horse they wanted to trade they'd call him. He was apt to leave the school to go take a look at the horse. He'd trade horses and cattle and anything else. He was sort of an entrepreneur.
DS: But you started to tell me why it was so large.
RA: Why was the district so large.
DS: Going clear to north Phoenix.
RA: Going back to 1910, the students who were, the young people of high school age living in the Peoria and Glendale area all had to go to Phoenix to high school. It was the only high school in the Valley. And so it was decided that they should organize a school closer to them.
DS: Even Buckeye, I know ah, Charlie Mitten tells about going into Phoenix Union, his kids.
RA: Yeah, there were a lot of them like that. And I don't know exactly, I wasn't there during that organizational period, that was before my time, but ah, Glendale was just a small community. There was no Sunnyslope at that time. Nothing at all. There was no community called Washington. There was an agricultural area out there, practically all farms, but no community. No density of population at all. And the schools would just, they would just draw lines as to where they thought it might be and they'd have the election and the election specified the boundaries. And they'd just decide that was a good boundary area. They included both the Washington elementary and the Glendale elementary districts. So the boundaries really encompassed both of those districts.
DS: I know, that's where the kids came from at the high school, out of Washington.
RA: Yes.
DS: And Alhambra.
RA: Well, Alhambra, Alhambra was not in the Glendale district. It was a part of the Phoenix Union High School District. But a lot of the kids continued to come to Glendale from the Alhambra area.
DS: That's right, I remember that.
RA: Yes. In fact, ah, while I was there, the Phoenix Union High School was growing too. And Dr. Montgomery thought the only way to solve their problem was to make all these Sunnyslope kids and the kids from the Washington area who were going to Phoenix, make them go to their own school. And so they adopted a policy not allowing any student outside their district to come into their school unless they paid tuition. Well when they did that, we felt in order to save our own necks so to speak, that we were growing too, we, the board had to adopt the same kind of policy. And when we did that, it meant that a lot of kids living just south of Glendale, as few as two and three miles south of Glendale, who were in the Pendergast District, and they were coming to Glendale High School. They could even catch one of the buses and come in. But when they had to go to a Phoenix High School, some of those kids had to walk into Glendale, catch a city bus, and be transported into Phoenix, make a transfer in order to get on another bus to get out to the school they were attending. So when the district boundaries were drawn back in, well the Washington Elementary District was organized I think probably in the 1880s sometime, and the Glendale Elementary District, Glendale is District #40...
DS: Glendale was 40, I remember that.
RA: Glendale was #40?
DS: I don't know why, but
RA: Well it's the fortieth elementary district that was organized in Maricopa County.
DS: ...that's a big, a big number.
RA: Well you see, the Peoria District is #11. They organized the elementary district in Peoria before they did the Glendale District.
DS: Well Peoria's older than Glendale.
RA: Yeah. And so the numbers go with the sequence of the organization. So when they organized the Glendale Union High School District, and this was a piece of legislation they got from California. California had unionized school districts. And unionized school districts don't appear in more than about twelve or fourteen states. In most of the states they have the school system in grades K through 12. Just one budget and so forth. Whereas in Arizona at that time, even when I went to Glendale in 1946, ah, you had a high school, you had a union high school board, you had an elementary school board. Both of them entirely separate. A person on one board could not serve on the other by law. So that, and then there were a lot of schools like Peoria, they had the Peoria Elementary District and Peoria High School District, the board of, the board of trustees for the elementary district constituted the board of education of the high school district. And essentially we were supposed to keep two sets of minutes, one for the elementary district when the trustees met, and one for the high school district when the board of education met. Had to have two different budgets, and had to, had to keep your accounts separate and everything. So you charge...when you bought gasoline you paid for part of it with the elementary issued funds and part with the high school district funds. Had two different taxes. Had a tax rate for the elementary district and one for the high school district. I know that there's quite a few people in the Glendale area that thought the Union High School District were paying our teachers too much. We had too high of salaries. They thought that we ought to do something to control the salaries. But high school salaries were so low that we couldn't prevent teachers from going to Phoenix. We lost a lot of good teachers. And Phoenix had a policy when I went there, or shortly after I went there. They would not employ a person unless they had a degree and unless they had at least one year teaching experience in another school. So the teachers, the people that graduated from Tempe couldn't go into the Phoenix Union High School District unless they went out somewhere else and taught for one year and then they could apply in Phoenix.
DS: By a degree, do you mean a Bachelor's Degree?
RA: Well, a Bachelor's Degree, yes.
DS: They've even starting requiring Master's...
RA: Yes, Phoenix Union High School started requiring Master's about that time. They required a Master's Degree and one year of teaching. And so we lost a lot of good teachers. We lost...like Al Davis, we lost Steve ..., we lost what was their track coach's name? Do you remember, ah, I can't remember his name now. He was one of the that kidded Barbara about the freckles on her face. I can't remember his name (background whisper), Stengland, Jim Stengland.
DS: Oh, Jim Stengland. I remember him when he was in college. Great pole vaulter.
RA: Yeah. We lost a lot of good teachers. Well, we lost young Vernon...and ah
DS: Did he teach at Glendale first?
RA: Yeah, he taught at Glendale first then he went into Phoenix. They offered him more money. They always offered $400 or $500 a year more than Glendale.
DS: I'll tell you something else. Before that, ASU or ASTC lost a lot of faculty because paid them more too.
RA: Yes, yes, some of the people teaching at the college in Tempe were offered contracts over at Phoenix Union District. They went over there to teach.
DS: They were notoriously low-paid in Tempe.
RA: Well during the Depression they, the Tempe salaries I think, they cut the full professors back to $1,600 a year...Burkhart, Grimes...some of those people, yeah, cut them way back. ...actually when we opened the Sunnyslope High School we intended to start, we proposed we start with a two-year high school, freshmen and sophomores, because ...take care of the juniors and seniors over in Glendale. However, once it became known that we were going to have a high school there, a lot of the juniors and seniors asked that we go ahead and offer a full high school program. They wanted to go to Sunnyslope High. They wanted to stay near home to go to school. And so we started out with a four year high school. About half the seniors continued on at Glendale. The other half transferred to Sunnyslope. And we had juniors, I think there were a little more than half of them started in Sunnyslope when we first started. So we started out as a four year high school.
DS: Let me ask you something. Your title was Superintendent or Principal?
RA: Well, it was essentially, I was really a Superintendent and a Principal, essentially.
DS: That confused me because superintendents are usually over more than one school.
RA: Yes, ordinarily they do. However, it depends on your definition of superintendent. The superintendent is usually the chief executive officer of a school district, and a principal is usually the head educational leader in a school. Well if you've only got one school, you're both, you could be both see.
DS: What was your title on your contract?
RA: Well, I don't, on the contract I think it was Superintendent. But I've not, I don't remember for sure. In fact, many of those years that I was there I didn't even have a contract. Cause I never, I never did believe in more than a one-year contract. When I told the board that I was going to go to Tempe in 1955, they offered me a four-year contract. Well, they'd offered me a longer term contract a time or two before and I'd refused it in every case. But I told them that I'd prefer not to have more than a one-year contract. If they wouldn't want me, then I sure...
DS: That's unusual...
RA: No, I never, in fact some years went by that they didn't even set my salary until they had to make payroll up in July. Finally at the board meeting in July I'd say, "Look, we gotta send the payroll in before the 15th, what are you going to pay me this year?" So they'd just tell me what the salary was. I didn't even have a formal contract for many years I was there. (whispering) Well, they paid me, I was one of the higher paid administrators in the state. I was probably fifth or sixth highest paid. E. W. Montgomery was the highest paid, then the superintendent down in Tucson, Bob Morrow had a good salary, and Charlie Carson, his assistant had a good salary. And then Harvey Taylor over in Mesa had a pretty good salary, but I was about the fifth or sixth highest. I never received a salary of more than $10,000 a year while I was there. Fact I went there at $4,500.
DS: That was a lot of money then.
RA: Yeah, it was. I started out as Superintendent in Peoria at $3,600, second year they gave me $3,600. And I made $4,200 the third year I believe. I don't remember.
DS: ...Peoria High before as superintendent?
RA: I went to Peoria in 1940, and I could not become the principal because I didn't have my Master's Degree, and I had just started working on my Master's Degree at Arizona State at that time. So they called me up. I started...Mr. Jansen...well I don't think they called me a counselor, they called me something else, I don't remember what it was, it was a coordinator I believe. I believe they used the word coordinator. And when I first went to Peoria High School I taught one or two classes. But essentially I did the work of a high school principal. I did all of the scheduling and I interviewed the teachers and I took care of everything that a high school principal would do.
DS: Was...there at that time?
RA: ...Jansen was there. When I went there he was 70 years old. And ah, he told me that he had tried to resign but the board didn't want him to. And he didn't know what to do, and so he stayed on. But ah, the year before I went there, the kids had gotten out of control. He was serving as a superintendent and a high school principal and the elementary school principal. He was serving as all of them. And when finally the year that he finally told me, he said, "I'm gonna retire this year. I'm not gonna let them talk me out of it." And he said, "I think they'll probably want to put you in as superintendent." I'd been there three years. And when he, he asked me to go to the board meeting with him, I did. And when he handed in his resignation, three board members read it and they laid it on the table and none of them said a word to each other. They didn't act on it, they didn't do anything about it. And the next day he said, he said, "What do you make, what do you make of that?" he said. "Are they going to accept my resignation or what, or what?" I said, "I don't know. I don't know." He said, "I'd sure like to know." He said, "I, I think it's time I retire." And I know, I was a very good friend of Pat Coor by that time, he and I were playing golf on Sundays. And Pat said, Pat asked me, he said, "Does Mr. Jansen want to retire?" He said, "We have never been sure that he really wanted to." And he said, "He's done so much good for our district that we don't want to let him go unless he really wants to." I said, "Well, he tells me he wants to. And he tells me that he's disappointed that you people won't accept his resignation." Well then, we worked it out that we would, his salary, his salary...I think they were paying him $3,600 a year.
DS: His last year.
RA: Yeah, $3,600. And they didn't think they ought to pay me as much as they paid him because he'd been there a long time. I didn't ask for a salary, I'd never asked for a salary rate anyway. In fact, when I went there Mr. Jansen asked me what it would take to get me to come to Peoria. I was teaching down in Yuma. And the reason, the reason I got hired ...up to Peoria is to fill in the last six weeks in home economics because Leslie, did you know Leslie Wilcox? She married, what was his name, married, I don't know, well anyway, she was pregnant and she had to take time off to have a baby. And she...and ah, Mr. Jansen asked Mrs...Eva Sculley where he could get a teacher for the last six weeks. And so actually Mr. Jansen contacted...We were running short on money. I was trying to build my house in Yuma, I built it myself, and we only borrowed $2,000 and we were running a little short on money. And I needed to go to summer school, I wanted to go to summer school. I'd gone to one session back at the State University in Iowa, but I took graduate work in chemistry. I wanted to start at Tempe, work on my Master's Degree in Educational Administration. And so Mr. Jansen called her and talked to her and she went up for an interview and he hired her for the last six weeks. And I'd never met Mr. Jansen until the last day of school, I went up to help her, actually we had our graduation in Yuma on Thursday night and Peoria was having theirs on Friday night. So I went up and I helped her carry the punch out of the basement and they had cookies and punch that they, after graduation exercise they set up tables outside and had cookies and punch and everybody who went to the ceremony would stand around and talk and drink punch and eat cookies. And I met Mr. Jansen in that atmosphere, and we chatted a little bit, nothing much said, we just visited. Helen went back Saturday morning to turn in her keys, Mr. Jansen asked her if she thought I'd be at all interested in a job. And she said, "No, I don't think so, but his salary is quite a bit more than teachers in Peoria are getting, so I don't think he would be." And she passed it off at that. And he said, "Well, if he is interested in a job, I'd like to talk to him." And she came home, she didn't say anything to me until the middle of next week, about Wednesday of next week. She remembered, we were in the process of trying to move, we built a house...moving over there. So about the middle of the week she said, "Oh, by the way, Mr. Jansen asked me if there was any chance that you might be interested in a job. I told him I didn't think you would be." I said, "Well what did he say? What kind of job was it?" Well, she didn't know. So I called Mr. Jansen and I went over on Saturday morning and had a long talk with him. And ah, he still acted like he wanted me, but, although I couldn't understand why. But he wanted me to go talk to board members, and the board members were, one of them was a barber and two of them were farmers. I went down and talked to the barber, he was communcative, he was very friendly, but didn't ask many questions or anything else. I felt rather embarrassed going down and saying, "Mr. Jansen asked me to come down and talk to you." But that was the thing. I said, "He wants to consider me for a job or something." So I talked to the farmer while he was on a tractor. He shut his tractor off and we sat there and talked for a few minutes. And I talked to the other one, he was milking a cow. So my first...was I didn't know whether I really wanted the job or not. And then after he talked to the board, they offered me the job, then he wanted to know what it would take to get me to come in the way of salary. I said, "Well, I was going to be getting, I think $1,600 or $1,650 out of Yuma." I said, "I didn't think I could think about moving for less than that." And I figured that, I knew they were only paying the teachers $1,200. And I said to him, I said, "Well, I don't think I could move for less than $1,900." Well, he didn't say anything, but he called me back in about a week and said, "Well, we'll offer you the job at $1,900." The reason I'm telling you this is at the end...
DS: Yeah, I need to get onto the Glendale...
RA: Yeah, at the end of the first year I began to try to get Mr. Jansen and ah, to get the board to increase the salaries of the teachers. And I surely thought it would cost in terms of tax rate and this, that, and the other, didn't amount to much. And so we did, and the board increased the teachers' salaries from $1,200 to $1,400. Gave them all a $200 raise. Which was pretty good. And then he came around to me about a month later, and he said, "The board wants to, the board has done a very nice thing for you. They've increased your salary to $2,000 for next year." So I got, I got a $100 raise and the teachers got a $200 raise, and I didn't say a word. I figured well, they wanted me. And I was happy, I was learning. I learned a lot that first year. (whispering)
DS: Yeah, we need to go onto Glendale.
RA: We need to get over to Glendale.
DS: Yeah.
RA: Well, after I'd been in Peoria for six years, the Glendale job opened up.
DS: Mr... had some difficulty about that time.
RA: Actually,...
DS: He had been there ah,
RA: He'd been there since 1931.
DS: Since 1930.
RA: 1930. He'd been there 16 years. His main, actually, well I think he had problems all the time he was there.
DS: Yes he did. There was always somebody trying to get him fired.
DS: Alway something. But the thing that really teed, teed off the board, so I was told later, he, someway or other, they blamed him for letting Mutt Ford get away from them and going over to Mesa to coach. That was the thing that really upset. And the day, and the night that they were to consider extending his salary, giving him another long-term contract, he excused himself from the board meeting and went down to the library. And he stayed down there about an hour, and finally he couldn't figure out why these guys didn't come and call him back into the meeting. And finally, he, Mr...went back up to the meeting and rapped on the door and went in, and ah, he said, "Well, have you made up your mind as to what you're going to do in the way of my contract?" And all this time they hadn't been talking about his contact at all. They'd been talking about football and other things. They were more concerned about losing their coach and this, that, and the other. And they really hadn't talked about his contract.
DS: Now Ford had, had succeeded Crouch then?
RA: Yeah, Crouch had gone into the military see.
DS: ...came in there too, didn't he?
RA: ...came in, but I think...came in...was in the military too. He came in after the war. Of course Crouch came back the year that I went there. Crouch had just come out of the service. So he came back on the job. But ah, so, and Crouch did not want to go back into coaching. Ah, and this was one of the things, the board wanted Crouch to go back into coaching. But he had already told Mr... that he would not coach football. He did not want to coach football. And so they spent all that time just talking about football and this, that, and the other and never got around to his contract. But someway or other Mr...got the idea that because they didn't do anything that they were getting to fire him. And he called, I think he called the faculty the next morning, and he told his teachers that he'd been fired, hoping to generate some response on the part of the teachers to come to his rescue. And his wife was a librarian, and she got word out to the students so I was told. And the board never told me this, one of the women there told me this, that some of the students came in with a petition signed by two or three hundred students asking them not to fire him, to keep him. Another group of students came in with about an equal number of signatures that said go ahead and fire him. And, and the teachers ah, there were very few of them, there were a few of them, but ah sort of generated some, but most of them did not want to take any part in it. And actually, he fired himself. And this kind of upset the board when they got these petitions and things, and so they said, "Well, maybe the best thing..." I didn't apply for the job. The thing that happened was that Ray...came out to see me. And I think two or three people had talked, well, yeah, Ray was the first one that came out. And ah, he came out to talk to me one day at Peoria High School. We chatted for quite some time. He said, "Well, I wish you'd put in an application." I said, "Well, I'm not sure if I want to apply. I just don't know what the conditions are down there." And I knew they'd been having some problems.
DS: But they were on the verge of this big growth you knew.
RA: Yeah, I knew that, yeah.
DS: It's gotta be a big job.
RA: Yeah, and so, Ray went back and I think the next day he brought Sam Joy out to visit with me. And then in the later part of the week he brought ah (wife talking in background). I've forgotten the details. Carl...Carl was more interested in running the financial part of running the district. I think he wanted to know whether, he wanted to assure himself that I knew something about school finance and so forth.
DS: Did you have your Master's by that time?
RA: Yeah I had my Master's. I got my Master's in ah, hmm forty, 1942. (wife said he'd started his Doctorate by then) I didn't start the Doctorate...until I went to Glendale. That was the first year that I went to Glendale. I went over to USC just for the four-week session I think...
DS: Is that where you got your ah,
RA: Doctorate at USC.
DS: Did you get a EDD or PHD?
RA: Yeah, EDD.
DS: At USC.
RA: Yeah, 19, I got that in '53. The reason I remember this, seven come eleven. I got my Master's Degree seven years after I got my Bacalaureate, and I got my Doctorate eleven years after I got my Master's. Seven come eleven.
DS: Well tell me something about the conditions in Glendale. Now you'd been gone fifteen years...
RA: I left Glendale in 1931, and went to school at Flagstaff.
DS: Had it changed a lot in that length of time?
RA: In that period of time?
DS: Between '31 and '45, or '46?
RA: No, it hadn't really. It hadn't changed a lot.
DS: No, I wouldn't think it would, but after that it really started didn't it?
RA: Even the high school. I don't remember how many students there were in high school when I was there, but I think there were about 56 or 60 in our graduating class. And ordinarily you would multiply that by six and you'd get the high school enrollment. So six times 60 would be 360. There were probably 350 - 400 kids in the high school when I was there.
DS: And we had 90 in our class. 1940, so you see, it hadn't grown that much.
RA: No, then in 1946, when I went back, I think they only had around 650 or so.
DS: So it just grew slowly.
RA: Slow growth.
DS: Now you started to tell me who was running things. That was one of the first things you mentioned there.
RA: Well, actually, running things at the school?
DS: No, in the town.
RA: In the town. In the town, I think that the one man that I think had more respect overall than almost anybody was Harry Bonsall, Sr.
DS: Yeah, that's what everybody says.
RA: I think he had, and he didn't ah, push himself. He didn't...
DS: He didn't run for office.
RA: No, he didn't want to.
DS: Never wanted to be mayor.
RA: But he was always, but he was glad to have one of his employees, ah, Bill Barkley, serve as mayor. And in the legislature. But I don't think he expected Bill to give him any special treatment at all. I don't think he expected that. He was just a man that, he had a tremendous rapport with his staff down at his organization.
DS: What did Barkley do for Bonsall at Southwest?
RA: He ran the ah Union Oil...for Southwest Oil. He was a union oil man.
DS: Yeah, I though of him as in oil. So he wasn't in the mill at all?
RA: No, he was in Union Oil. They had their, they were separate and apart, they were...
DS: I knew Bill well. He was very, he became Speaker of the House. Now who else besides Bonsall?
RA: I, now, in other areas, I think another man was Frank Carter. I think he had a lot of ah, a lot of rapport.
DS: Was he a JP then?
RA: Yes.
DS: And he had run a men's clothing store when I was in school.
RA: Yes, he had a men's clothing store, before that he worked, he worked on the school, he was a school custodian.
DS: Is that right.
RA: Well maybe it was, I don't know whether it was before or after he run the men's clothing store, but he was, and I remember...Frank Carter was coming to work in the morning, dressed up like he was the superintendent. He took off his good clothes and put on his work clothes and go to work. Then after work that day he'd take a shower and dress up again and go home. But Frank was a good worker. But I think Frank had a real understanding for people, for down and out people. I think he had a real feel for those people. He'd had some tough going in his younger days. And I think a lot of people respected him, respected Frank a great deal. So in terms of, now you see he had certain influence in areas entirely separate than Harry Bonsall did. Harry had influence in terms of Chamber of Commerce...
DS: Rotary,
RA: Rotary,...Well I think another, if you think about it...
DS: Billy...
RA: ...Billy Jack. He was down at the University of Arizona.
DS: He came after I left I guess. Though his family was very instrumental in Glendale from before the turn of the century.
RA: He's not of that same family.
DS: He's not of that same family? Oh, I thought he was.
RA: No, he's not of that family.
DS: Oh, well I'm glad you straightened me out on that. Okay.
RA: No, he was not related to Lenny Jack, no. Now Lenny Jack, she was, in terms of women in the community...
DS: Yeah, she was the power. She started the Women's Club.
RA: Well, she was a, she was it. Yeah. Lenny Jack, she was something. Betty Lou was her daughter. And she had another daughter, what was the other one's name? I've forgotten, but anyway. Francis Jack, yeah. I think there may have been a boy or two in that family, there was, but I don't remember what their names were, but Bill was not that.
DS: Unusual that, I never knew anybody else with that name.
RA: Yeah. But Bill, I think, Bill, another man with quite a bit of influence and integrity...But obviously Harry Bonsall probably was number one, and I'd say Frank Carter was...and I think Harold Smith had quite a bit of rapport...particularly as related to school and education.
DS: Now Bill Ryan didn't hold the position that some editors did in town...
RA: No, Bill Ryan...
DS: Wonder why.
RA: Bill Ryan, well...
DS: Well, he drank too much.
RA: Well, yeah.
DS: I worked for Bill at that time.
RA: Yeah, you did, that's right.
DS: Forty-seven. Mm-hmm.
RA: Bill, you, ah, I had trouble sometimes trying to figure out whether he meant what he said a lot of times. At times I think Bill would say one thing but he was thinking something else. I don't know. Leah Cox was a...
DS: You think she had more power than Bill?
RA: Oh yeah, oh yes, yeah. Yeah, I don't think Bill had, huh I do, I guess you know you have little things that tip you off to certain things. Bill called me about just about the time school one day,...he said, "I haven't received any order yet for mimeograph paper." And ah, I said, "Do you sell mimeograph paper?" He said, "Yeah." I said, "Well, I didn't know that." He said, "I've been selling it to the school for years." I said, "How much a ream do..." I said, "What do you ask for your mimeograph paper?" "A dollar for a ream." "A dollar for a ream?" I said, "I've got some estimates from the school supply house in Phoenix and I can get it there for 83 cents a ream." And then he kind of blew up. He said, "Well," he said, "we're the taxpayers out here. We're paying to run that school and we think we ought to be entitled to its business." I said, "Well, in a competitive basis, your price is right, I'd would be more than happy to give you..." But I said, "You're not quoting a price that I can go to the board and tell them that that's where we should spend the taxpayers' money." And I think I got off on the wrong foot with Bill.
DS: He sold ah, he had the stationery store. We used to have to work in there after we got through with the newspaper.
RA: ...but I didn't realize that he'd been selling these school supplies. And I'd gotten ah, some quotations from PBSW, O. B. Marston, and maybe...supply or something. And so I think I made Bill mad. I didn't realize. I wouldn't have bought it from him anyway, but ah, if I would have known it sooner I would have given him a chance to bid. I didn't even send him a bid form. I didn't know that he supplied, really. And so Bill, Bill and I never did have the best relationship.
DS: Now Rennick was mayor just before you got there.
RA: I think so.
DS: He left in '45 I believe.
RA: As mayor?
DS: Yeah.
RA: I went there in '46. That'd be about right. And when I went there Mr. Rennick was about ready to retire. He was, Mr.Yelman said he'd already retired, but he hadn't. He was still on the payroll. And he was, he...But he wasn't really interested in teaching. He told me, he said, "As you grow older, your interests change." He said, "I've gotten to the point where I really don't get excited working with kids anymore." He said, "I'd much rather work with adults." And he wanted the business manager's job. And essentially, I think ah, the first year I was there, the second year I was there, I kind of moved him into that business manager's. I think maybe the first year. I lightened his class load and in fact I think he only taught one or two classes and then he was going to do the business for me. Take care of all the purchasing and this, that, and the other.
DS: Who was taking care of that before, the principal?
RA: Ah, well I think Mr. Yelman took care of it. Took care of all that.
DS: Amazing what the principals had to do in those days.
RA: Well, he...in other words he gave the business to Bill Ryan and gave...I made quite a few enemies right after, Mutt, I'd always...and the Whitney family. But Mutt had the school at Firestone and he had the Wilson Sporting Goods...(wife reminding him that this was going on tape) Well, I won't get into too many things. But anyway, Mutt was a good man. But Mutt had a little bit of the same opinion that Bill Ryan did. That inasmuch as he had a sporting goods store, he should get the sporting goods business. And my theory was that you should spend the taxpayers' money and get the greatest benefits you can from the dollars that you collect.
DS: Well, of course you were right. But they ah, there was a provincial attitude to shop in Glendale. I remember those big ads about "Shop In Glendale." Keep anybody from going to town.
RA: Yeah that's why, in fact that was just sort of a, a feeling that you should shop in Glendale. Well, I always wanted to shop in Glendale and I wanted to shop in Prescott too.
DS: Who were the organization that were the big, most important? Rotary I suppose, and Chamber?
RA: Chamber of Commerce became fairly good.
DS: Pardon me.
RA: Chamber of Commerce became a good organization after we employed an executive secretary. We employed a fellow by the name of Fred, I can't remember his name, but you've it there. But he was brought on a part-time basis. He never had any Chamber experience. But he'd...back in the Midwest or East somewhere. And ah, he came in on a part-time basis. But he was working full time. And he increased the membership so much, and the dues came in, we had, the Chamber had enough money that they put him on a full-time basis.
DS: About what year was that?
RA: Well, this must have been around '48, '49, somewhere in there. But they, but Fred had some health problems. That was one of the reasons he was in Arizona. He'd worked too hard back where he was. And he became, I guess it...still in Glendale, still there before '55. He'd had some real problems with his legs. Veins were giving out on him and ah, I think eventually he had one leg amputated. And ah, when he got ill, whoever was running, pretty much the power in the Chamber at that time decided they needed to get a full-time man. And so they let Fred go and they got somebody else...
DS: Who was mayor after Rennick? I have that record too, but I just wanted to know what you remembered about him?
RA: I don't remember who the mayor was.
DS: You know they shifted to the City Manager form of government in 1947...Bud Balkman. Remember him?
RA: Forty-seven, Bud Balkman.
DS: He was the first City Manager.
RA: The first City Manager.
DS: I remember that because he came in just before I got there. The Glendale News. And they paved all the streets just about that time, remember that?
RA: Yeah, yeah.
DS: Do you remember when they paved all the streets at one time? Every street that hadn't been paved was paved. And this was a national, in fact I wrote a national story for Public Works Magazine about it. That really tore up the town.
RA: ...Balkman, but he wasn't City Manager more than two or three years, was he?
DS: Not very long.
RA: And I don't remember who took over, but Stan Vanderpugh took over initially.
DS: Yeah, he came up as a policeman and then Police Chief.
RA: Yeah, that's right.
DS: Vanderpugh I think ranks as the outstanding City Manager in the history of the town. That was after you left.
RA: Yeah, he was a good Chief of Police, too. Now he was Chief of Police while I was there. And he was a good man.
DS: Now Chris Sheets, have you been ah chief...
RA: Chris Sheets ah...
DS: He was chief when I was in school.
RA: Oh, was he?
DS: Yeah.
RA: Chief of Police?
DS: His daughter, Barbara, was very...
RA: Well he wasn't on the police force while I was there.
DS: Is that right. He'd been fired once, and then was brought back. Remember Dick Witter came on as a judge.
RA: Yeah, he was a judge, Dick Witter came on about the time, well, I think when Frank Harden went in as JP, Dick Witter came in as City Manager didn't he?
DS: Mm-hmm, that's right.
RA: About that time.
DS: Yeah. I talked to him and to Irene Witter, his wife. Who were both with the city for many years, and then ah, Bernice Lucas Grog, remember her?
RA: Yeah, Bernice Lucas, I remember and then she married somebody.
DS: She was city clerk for many years.
RA: Yeah, she was ah, she ran the place there for a long time.
DS: That's right. Uh-huh.
RA: She was very good.
DS: Now who were the mayors you remember the most while you were there?
RA: Huh, I don't remember any of them. Barkley was.
DS: Yeah, Bill was.
RA: He was mayor several years. Ah, I remember...
DS: Who was the legislator from that area?
RA: Ahh,
DS: Glendale has never had any ah, a Congressman or a Governor well, technically. Ha, ha, ha.
RA: ...one gentlemen who was in the automobile business that became Governor.
DS: Well, strange, Glendale people don't think he had much to do with Glendale politics or operation.
RA: Naw, he didn't. I don't think he had much to do with anything, really...
DS: He didn't live in Glendale I don't think, did he?
RA: No. Ah, I'm looking down through the list here at some of the people that...Al...
DS: I talked to Al not long ago, he's still around.
RA: Is he still, is he still with the pharmecutical?
DS: No, he's retired.
RA: He's retired.
DS: He was with the State office.
RA: I saw him somewhere not too long ago and had a nice little visit with him.
DS: I want to ask you about black students at Glendale High. Now when I was at Glendale High there were no black students. They all had to go into Phoenix Colored School, which later became Carver. Now, was that a law or rule or just a custom?
RA: Well, let's put it this way. The state law was enacted requiring that elementary schools have a separate educational program for black students. That was mandatory at the elementary level. At the high school level, if there were a sufficient number of black students to constitute a school, the board could, but didn't have to, could have a separate school, and that's when Phoenix organized the Carver High School. And then of course we got this segragation problem come along following, well actually this thing began to come to a head during World War II when Roosevelt mandated that the black soldiers be given the same rights as the white soldiers. And ah, Harry Truman followed along with the same philosophy. And then it wasn't until we had the Brown vs. the Board of Education in Topeka, Kansas...
DS: 1954.
RA: Fifty-two or fifty-four? Ah that it became mandatory that we do away with segregated schools.
This is a continuation of our interview with Dr. Robert Ashe. We were speaking about black students.
RA: When I was in, first year I became Superintendent in Peoria, 1943, I had some black parents that came to me and wanted to have a place for their kids to be in school. And ah, there were only about three or four children involved, and we thought we'd accommodate them in the public schools right there in Peoria. However, within the next few days, I had a request from the Dysart School District. They said they had several black families that had moved out there to pick cotton, and they wanted to know if there wasn't some way we could put all of these black children together and put them in a school. We had a vacant schoolhouse out in Marionette, which was where they built that motel out in Sun City, that's where it stood. We had a brick building. Didn't have modern accommodations, had an outhouse, two outhouses. We had to haul water, we didn't have a well, we had to haul water for it, but anyway, here we were going to swamped with ah, we only had a few kids, but they had quite a number and they didn't have a room for them. They didn't have any space for them. And so we decided to put them all together and hire a teacher and have a one-room school for the black children. We didn't have any high school close. And so...
DS: Said state law mandated separate schools for elementary.
RA: For elementary, even at that time see. Ah, so we went ahead and I interviewed teachers. I had several...I won't go into that. But we had a, hired a teacher and had about 16 or 18 students out there, most of them were from the Dysart District. We had some from Peoria too. We operated that school for two years. We had so much trouble, the teacher had problems. The first year she was single, she had a car and it would break down. I'd get a phone call in the morning saying, "My car broke down, I can't get to school." And we'd have to get somebody out there to open that school. In fact I went out there an opened the school, started school several days. And so we decided, we had so many problems, we just decided we'd do away with that school at the end of the second year. And a lot of the students who were in the Dysart area moved away. So there weren't as many. And I told the families of the kids in our school, I said, "Put them on the school bus; send them right on into school. We'll take care of them." And we integrated them in the Peoria schools in 1945.
DS: Against the law then, huh?
RA: Against the law, but we didn't care. I mean, we just knew it was right. Well it so happens that when I went to Glendale, about the second or third year I was there, these families moved to Glendale. Now the kids were in high school. There were two brothers. They were, they were nice boys. And they came and wanted to go to high school, and we just signed them up. Said nothing to anybody about it, just signed them up. I didn't even consult the board on it. Just went ahead and enrolled them. And we never had any problems at all with those two. And eventually, I presume, there've been more since then, but I don't know. Cause Glendale didn't have many minorities except for the Spanish-American, they had a lot of them. But then, of course, when the law, desegragation...Phoenix Union High School did away with the Carver High School, and then they put all of those, they divided those teachers among all of the other schools. But that went over real good because they had a group of excellent teachers. They...
DS: They were good, yeah.
RA: They had a man named Robinson.
DS: Robinson, mm-hmm.
RA: Who would go back in the South and he would witness teachers teaching, and he picked out the good teachers and offered them a job. He could offer them more money than anybody in the South was offering. So he could get the choice, the pick of the lot. So those teachers who went into the Phoenix high schools then were well accepted as far as I know.
DS: They were dismayed at the time they decided to integrate cause they weren't sure they could get a job anymore.
RA: Yeah. But it was agreed that they would keep them, and ah, in fact I think there was some apprehension...Dr. Montgomery wasn't sure that, I'm not sure that he really like the idea of integrating them, but on the other hand, he decided that they had to do it. And Dr. Montgomery was getting old then. He was getting to where they wanted him to retire, but he didn't want to retire. Finally they, they set the date for him to retire. And then they had, they had a lot of turnover since then. See Mr. Jansen was Superintendent in Phoenix before Dr. Montgomery came.
DS: Oh yes, I remember that. He was Superintendent when Reg Manning was at school and they had that big fear about the yearbook. I don't know if you knew about that or not.
RA: Barry Goldwater was one, was a pupil there at Phoenix Union High School.
DS: Well Jansen asked Barry Goldwater to leave school and go somewhere else. Yes he did. That's why he went to military school.
RA: Yeah. Well anyway, as far as the black population was concerned, there wasn't many black people in the Glendale area. There, these families lived down south of the ice plant somewhere. I don't remember where they lived. I never did know where they lived.
DS: Mexicans were all grouped in one area down in the...
RA: Pretty much, southeast part of town.
DS: The Russians were out west.
RA: Russians were out west.
DS: The Japanese were ah,
RA: The Japanese were scattered...
DS: There were quite a few.
RA: Yeah, Japanese were scattered around...
DS: Quite a lot of those. And they harrassed them for quite a while. I don't know if you remember that or not.
RA: ...after the war?
DS: Before. Nineteen thirty-four and five they had a concerted to try to get them out of there.
RA: That was '34 and '35 huh? Well, I didn't know that. I know that Sarah Hardy was always friendly to the Japanese.
DS: Very...toward Japanese, mm-hmm.
RA: And she was ah, she would teach some of those priests the English language so that they could communicate with their people. They'd bring some of those Buddist priests over.
DS: Kids went to Japanese school after they finished their regular day.
RA: Yeah.
DS: They were all good kids, all good students. I don't know a single one that wasn't.
RA: Yeah, in fact if they weren't a good student, the families kept them out on the farm. They wouldn't let them go to school. Huh.
DS: There was, well the Tadadno boys...
RA: I was, I was in Peoria in 19, I went there in '40. Pearl Harbor came along in December of '41, and Bill...called me probably in April or May of '42 and wanted to know if there was any way that the Peoria schools could help educate some of the Japanese kids. Bill...at that time was president of the J.A.C.L. - Japanese-American Citizens League. And in order to get over to Peoria to talk to me, this is '41 ah, '42, it would have been in April or May of '42, in order to get there he couldn't go on the highway to Phoenix.
DS: They drew the line down Grand Avenue and across...
RA: He had to go north and had to go the back route. He couldn't cross Grand Avenue. He couldn't get on Grand Avenue. But he came over to see me, and I said, "How many students do you think you'll have?" He said, "Well," he said, "most of them will be juniors and seniors." He said, "I don't think they'll be over 15 or 20." I said, "Well, let me talk to the board, and we'll see. Let me talk to the Superintendent and we'll talk to the board and see what they say." So we took it up to the board meeting and we had just three board members - Howard Cook, Bill McFredericks, and Pat Coor, and all of them had boys in the service. In fact, Bill McFredericks had already lost one son who was flying fighter, fighter planes over Europe, over Germany, shot down. Uh, but, they all asked the question, "Are these kids citizens of the United States?" I said, "They were all born here." And by definition, anybody born in the United States is a citizen, period. And they said, "Well, if they're citizens, they're entitled to go to school. And if the other schools, Phoenix schools and Glendale schools can't take them, we ought to, we ought to help them." They all had that. And then the next question was, "How do we make this break? Do we tell the community, do we ask the community, or do we just do it? What do we do?" And I can remember very vividly, we had a very active Kiwana's Club, we just organized one in Peoria, we had an active Chamber of Commerce, had an active Women's Club. I said, "Shouldn't we go and talk to these people about it?" And Pat Coor was very adamant. He said, "Don't tell anybody." He said, "Just tell the kids to show up here the first day of school and take care of them."
DS: You just start a controversy if you do.
RA: That's right. And Scottsdale had asked the parents. And they really rose up in arms and Scottsdale schools couldn't take them. And I think, I'm sure whether Tempe's high was able to take any or not. Mesa might've had some, I'm not sure. But, first day of school, I decided I should've at least let the faculty know about these kids. So we called an early faculty meeting at 8 o'clock, and I informed the faculty about it. I guess we had a faculty meeting the day before. I told them about it. I called a student council meeting early that meeting to inform them what was going to happen. I said, "We're going to have some Japanese students here on campus." I said, "We're going to let them enroll." And I wanted them to be sure to treat them friendly and be as good to them as they could. And ah, but before, even before I had my student council meeting the kids were arriving on campus. They got there before 8 o'clock. They wanted to get enrolled. We told them to come at nine, see, but they came at 7:30 some of them. We had 42.
DS: Forty-two.
RA: Forty-two.
DS: From all over the west valley.
RA: From all over, yes, from all, some of them had been going to high school in Tolleson. Some of them, most of them in Glendale, north Phoenix...
DS: Glendale didn't ah, kick anybody out, did they?
RA: Well they couldn't, they couldn't go to Glendale.
DS: Well Ernie Kahutsu was there, in fact he was elected Cardinal King and raised big furor.
RA: What year?
DS: Forty-two.
RA: In '42?
DS: Forty-two.
RA: Did he graduate in '42?
DS: Probably.
RA: They drew the line on April 1, 1942. That's when they had the meeting. April 1. And so all those kids in Glendale and Tolleson and other places, they had to get out of their school April 1. They couldn't go back across that line.
DS: Well I elected Ernie, and there was such a furor in the town that he resigned. Which was kind of sad.
RA: Yeah. Well, but he had to, he had, Kohutsu
DS: He'd always had his kids in Glendale High School.
RA: But ah, we got those kids, none of them were able to finish high school where they were because they pulled out on April 1. And so we had, Mrs. Hardy was the person in the Glendale High School faculty that was most willing to cooperate and help. And we had our teachers correspond, sometimes by phone, sometimes by mail, with the teachers in Glendale. Found out what they had to do to complete the previous year's work see. Those kids had done quite well up until April 1 and then they had to drop out. And so we arranged for those kids to finish their high school, you might say working with the teachers in Peoria with the help of the Glendale teachers. And ah, I think in that first graduating class, class of '43, they probably had 12 or 15 seniors who were Japanese that year. We had, I think we had four Tunita boys, we had Tom,...Suzuki,
DS: Were they treated alright?
RA: Oh yeah. We had no problem at all. There was only one, huh, we only had one little incident the whole year that I knew about...but I remember some of the students came in to see me one day and they wanted to know what we could do with a guy that ran a cafe downtown. Ah, they had taken ah, one of our students, I've forgotten what his, they always called him, the kids sort of nicknamed Hirihito or something. They nicknamed him. He was sort of an onry little devil. His name was Hero Okomiashi. And his brothers had a farm, oh, I would say about lateral 19-1/2 and P Avenue in there somewhere. And he had some older brothers running the farm. And Hero had been going to Glendale, but ah, he had to come Glendale.
DS: I didn't notice. I didn't know they had to leave Glendale.
RA: Oh yeah. Yeah. Most of them were from Glendale. We had some real fine students. Real good students. Ah, but some of the Peoria kids went downtown with Hero, Hirihito, and they sat down at the counter in the cafe next to Pat's Barber Shop and they ordered a sandwich and something to drink, soda pop or something, but the cook came out of the kitchen. And he saw that Japanese kid there, and he came out with a cleaver. He came out of the kitchen and he started after him, this kid. The kid was smart enough to get out of there. And they all left.
DS: How about that.
RA: And ah, they came to me complaining about the action that cook. I said, "Well," I said, "I can't" I said, "I certainly don't stick up for the cook. On the other hand, when Hirihito came here, when Hero came here, he was told that he was not to cross Grand Avenue." He knew that and he should never have gone downtown. In fact none of the Japanese people would ever go downtown. They drove their own cars, but they never went down...But he did, cause he was with these other kids, these Anglos. But I didn't stick up for the cook. But on the other hand I didn't stick up for Hero either. Cause he was doing something he shouldn't have been doing. Say look, "If Hero'd been doing what he should have been doing, he wouldn't have had any of that problem."
DS: Tough times. Can you imagine what it would be like to have, just you were your race, just because you were who you were.
RA: But that was the only incident that we had. I never, Hero was one, he would ditch once in awhile with these Anglos. And I'd get after him. One time I suspended him for, well, for a few days, two or three days I think. And I, one requirement was that he bring his parents back to talk to me before he got back in school. Well his parents didn't speak English, but his brothers did. And so one of the brothers came back with him a couple days later and I told him exactly what Hero was doing. He was late to class, he was ditching classes, he just wasn't...
DS: That's unusual for a Japanese.
RA: Yeah, well it is. He was an unusual type. You couldn't help but like the kid. On the other hand he was onry, he was an onry little devil. And the brother listened and shake his head...I think I kicked him out for a week, but in the meantime I said somebody better come back here and talk to me before you come back see. So his brother came in two or three days, a couple of days after I'd kicked him out. He still had some time to spend outside of school. And ah, when the brother left, he said, "I don't think you're going to have any more trouble with Hero." I said, "What makes you think so?" He says, "Hero doesn't like to operate that tractor." And he said, "If he can't come to school, he's going to be on that tractor at daylight in the morning, and he'll be on that until dark at night." And he said, "I don't think you'll have any more trouble with Hero." And we didn't have. But they don't believe in kids going to school and messing around. They want them to study.
DS: I want to change the subject a little bit. You had at your time, a lot of future journalists going through Glendale High School. Now would you credit Al Levin for that?
RA: Well I think so, yes. We had...
DS: Tell me about him. How'd you get him...
RA: Huh.
DS: It's Levin, isn't it?
RA: A-L-V-I-N L-E-V-I-N. That name is pronounced, back in Baltimore, it's pronounced (Laveen).
DS: Hmm.
RA: But when he came to me, I didn't know what, I called him Levin. He stopped in my office on a Saturday morning before school started on a Monday.
DS: What year would that have been?
RA: Nineteen forty-six.
DS: At Glendale High School?
RA: At Glendale High School. When I went to Glendale, I had the responsibility of hiring, I needed ah, six teachers. I called the placement bureau in Tempe, at U of A, and Flagstaff. There were no teachers available. I sent notices to at least eleven placement agencies outside the State of Arizona. Colorado, California, New Mexico, several, all over.
DS: Great time to be a teacher, huh?
RA: I got one, one applicaion from Colorado. A lady that wrote and said that she would like the job. I listed the job we had. She wanted an English job. She said she, she knew that she could handle the job, she had taught for sixteen years, and each year was in a different school. Well, I didn't want her. But anyway, Saturday morning before school started, he walks in, walks up and he wondered if there was any chance that we had a job open. And we still hadn't hired the full faculty. I'd hired Tilly Lao, did you know Tilly? Tilly Lao was an English teacher. She was an older person. And I'd assigned her Journalism. She didn't want it, but she said she'd teach it. Along with some English. But she didn't want the Journalism, but she'd take it in order to get the job. Another requirement was that I'd help her find a house. I'd help her find a house then...Levin walked in, and he had taught Journalism and English back in the Baltimore High, a Baltimore high school for two or three years. A young man, had a wife who had asthma, and the doctors thought the dry climate in Arizona would be good for her. They had one baby, one little girl just a year old I think. And I, I needed another teacher. I didn't even have enough teachers.
DS: Was he qualified?
RA: Ah, he was a graduate, yes. He'd had training back at the university there back in Baltimore. I've forgotten which one it was now. Yes, he was qualified. So I sent him down to the state, that is he couldn't...it was Saturday morning. I said, "You're going to have to go down and..." I think he'd already been down and found out that he had enough ah, he had everything except the Arizona Constitution...They always gave you a year to get that. But he qualified. I said, "You come to work Monday morning, and I'll give you a Journalism class and some English II or III." I don't remember what it was. But I think I fit him up with four, he had four class periods a day. Then he had publication. He had a newspaper and the annual. So they only had four, I think he only taught four hours a day. And Al was the one that sort of got these kids interested in Journalism. Yeah, we had several there. We had Hugh Harrelson and ah, Jerry Eaton.
DS: Jerry Eaton, mm-hmm. The Rich kids.
RA: George Rich. George and...yeah. Jerry Jackal went into photography, but Levin got him started in that. And Jerry's wife was in, she'd done some writing, and ah, the boy that was from Mayer, Herbie Serrat.
DS: Herbie Serrat on UPI.
RA: Yeah. These were some of the people that ah...
DS: They were all Levin students?
RA: Levin students, yeah. I mean he was more or less...
DS: I missed him. They ah, Journalism when I was there was just sort of handed to whoever was available.
RA: Well, whoever would take it.
DS: ...T. B. Schwartz.
RA: Yeah, T. B. Schwartz. He was a nice guy.
DS: Did you know him?
RA: Yeah, I met him. In fact, he was leaving, he was leaving see. And he got a job in California somewhere. He left. But I got...before he left. He's a nice guy.
DS: A little, round man.
RA: Yeah, he's really roly poly. But Levin came and ah, I told Levin, I said, "I can't promise you a job because the board, only the board can hire." I said, "We're not going to have a board meeting until next Wednesday." But I said, "You come Monday morning and I'll put you to work. And you fill out this application." And he filled out the application. And I didn't have any papers on him or anything else. I did make a phone call back to somebody back in Baltimore and they said he was a good teacher. And he came and started teaching. The first three days everything seemed to be going good, and so I met the board Wednesday night at the board meeting and I said, "I'm recommending," he was one, I think there maybe were one or two others I was recommending that they employ. And I remember Sam Joy looked at that name, and he says, he says, "Is this guy a Jew?" Yeah. I said, "I don't know whether he's Jewish or not." I said, "I don't really know." I said, "Look on the application there." I said, "There's a place there that asks religious preference see."
DS: And they had that on...
RA: And so he looked on there, but Levin hadn't put anything in there, he left it blank, see.
DS: He learned.
RA: I said, "I don't know whether he's Jewish or not." But ah, I said, "I don't care." I said, "He's in the classroom, he's doing a good job first three days."
DS: Did Joy care?
RA: Well listen. When I went to Glendale, they didn't have a Jew on the faculty. If they had a Catholic it was...he was the only one I think. They just didn't employ. They didn't have any Spanish-Americans.
DS: Only one Mormon I think. That was O. W. Allen.
RA: O. W. Allen was the Mormon. Oh, we got one or two more later. Mormons are something different. But anyway, that school was a WASP school.
DS: I'll say it was.
RA: And that's just the way...(whispering) yeah, most of them were, but that one particularly was just sort of run that way.
DS: No Hispanic teachers there at all.
RA: No, none. I hired the first Hispanic, I hired some Catholics. And of course...is a strong nation, and ah, I don't know why. Masonic Order, they, they didn't like the black people.
DS: Or Catholics.
RA: And they didn't like Catholics, see. So you kind of, there were a lot of that kind of feeling going around in the community.
DS: I was shocked to find out that B. B. Moore was an awful bigot. Did you know that? In fact, he was in the Klan for awhile. Yeah. And he said something about, "They'll never have niggers in school with my kids."
RA: Well, that was a public high.
DS: Rather general feeling.
RA: Well, even in Glendale, they had a Ku Klux Klan organization there. In fact, I think, VanCamp's the one that told me about some people belonging to the Klan.
DS: Well almost everybody in Tempe belonged to that. I have the records books, so.
RA: Yeah. You got it all set up, huh. But it, yeah, okay. But Levin did a nice job, and then when it came time to evaluate teachers and recommend for the next year, I recommended he be reemployed. And the board members, one of the commented, said, "Well, when they made him, they threw away the cast, the mold." But, sort of excusing their prejudice away. Well, this guy's different. But he was with us three years I guess.
DS: Is that all.
RA: Only three years.
DS: Why did he leave?
RA: Well, he ah, he did make quite a contribution. He would go into the senior problem classes, and we had, we had some outstanding teachers. John Kerner was a very outstanding, did you know John Kerner?
DS: He wasn't there when I was there.
RA: He came after you. But John Kerner was an outstanding senior problems teacher.
DS: What's senior problems?
RA: Well, that's political...it's a social studies, it's a social studies. But one of the problems was racial and religious predjudice and that type of thing. And Kerner would get Levin to come in with his skull cap, what do you call it,...and his...shawl and talk to him about his religion.
DS: He practiced it though.
RA: He practiced it. He's not too faithful, but he practiced it. And ah, that...you couldn't help but like him...he was rather pointed at times. But I gave, I gave the faculty quite a bit of freedom in doing things. One of the things that the Chamber of Commerce was upset about was that Glendale wasn't getting enough publicity in the paper, in the Phoenix papers. And I said, I said, and they got somebody to come out from the Phoenix...
This is a continuation of the Robert Ashe interview.
RA: was upset because Glendale wasn't getting enough publicity. And, finally I was, I don't know if I was president that year, I was on the board of directors anyway, I suggested maybe we get our Journalism teacher to see if we couldn't generate some stories, Levin was a photographer also, he'd done some pool work. And so they said they'd pay him so much a line, so much an inch for copy, and they'd pay him for his pictures that they could use. So, Levin started ah, writing...
DS: Got his own newsgirl, huh?
RA: Started...so to speak. And he was making $75 - $100 a month. That's darn good money back in those days. Just from the Republic, from the things that he said in the paper. And some of the stuff he sent in was not stuff that I would particularly send in, but he did. Because it had, it was newsworthy. In other words, people would read it. That's what the paper's for. One of them was ah, you know we had those pep stories, pep girls, pep squad, what do they call themselves. Pom-pom girls, I don't know. But in their initiation they made those girls who were going to come into their club, they made them wear funny garments. And one day, three of the girls, part of the initiation, they carried ah, pep cereal, Kellogg's Pep Cereal. And whenever they would meet, see one of them, they'd have to reach in and grab some cereal and eat it. This was the kind of thing. And he caught two of those girls and Levin took their picture holding up their pep cereal boxes and he wrote a story about this damn thing. In the Arizona Republic. Not only did it get in the Republic, it was picked up and printed several places around the country. He got a letter from the, somebody from the Kellogg...
DS: ...
RA: Yeah, and they were happy to know that the girls like the Kellogg's product and so forth. Glad to hear about the story. But I mean, that's the kind of, he'd stick...
DS: He was a hustler. Yeah.
RA: He was a hustler, and he would get, if they had something going on at the Chamber, he'd go down and learn enough about it and ask a few questions and write a story and send it in. And Levin could write rapidly. He didn't waste a lot of time.
DS: Who was supposed to be covering? They always had Glendale reporters...
RA: Well, at that time...
DS: Thelma Heatwole had started by that time I think.
RA: She was with the ah
DS: She was a Herald.
RA: Thelma was with the Herald most of the time. It was after I left that she left the Herald and went with the Republic, or about the time I left I think. But ah, I think that Earl Kazar, who was sort of running the paper boys out in that area, he was responsible for...just like this guy up here...name of Smith here in Prescott. He writes a few stories for the Republic. I think he runs it. He's in charge of the distributorship mainly I think. But anyway, Levin, he started picking up pretty good money on that. So the Chamber got, Glendale got a lot of publicity out of it. We had, one day I got a phone call from the principal out at Phoenix Union High School, I believe it was the principal, it might have been from the District office, asking me if we could take care, could serve as the host for a couple of German educators who were over here to study American schools. They were having faculty meetings or something, and they didn't think the educators would be very interested in seeing what was going on in Phoenix schools that day. I said, "Sure, send them on out. We'd be glad to." And they came out the next morning and I introduced them to some of our students and assigned, I guess I used some of Levin's students really, there, darned Journalist students were running around all over anyway. I let them take them around to visit the classes and take them to shops and answer questions for them. In fact, they went down into the Journalism office, we had that down in the basement, and ah, while they were down there, the editor of the Cardinal Highlights or whatever the Cardinal paper was called,
DS: That's right, Cardinal Highlights.
RA: Anyway, went down there and the editor, a young lady, I don't remember which one it was, she was sitting there, and one educator was leaning over her right shoulder and the other on the left, and Levin took the picture and then they wrote a story. And they wrote quite a lot, he had quite a long story on this thing. Column...maybe a column that long. On these educators and some of the things, how our schools compared to the German schools, just a few of these things. He put a lot of stuff in that. And he got that picture in the paper the next morning and got that in the Phoenix paper the next morning. E. W. Montgomery, meeting with his principals, I guess it was that Friday afternoon or sometime the same week. And oh he was upset, he was mad. Cause they had gone to so much trouble in getting a lot of things about these two guys, getting all ready for a big news story for the Phoenix paper, see,
DS: And Levin scooped them, huh.
RA: And Levin scooped them. And they took their story down and the paper said, "This is not news. This is old stuff. We've already printed." But he'd get things like that, see. And
DS: Why did he leave?
RA: Why? I think it, mainly because of family. His wife's family always wanted them to stay back there. And ah, when he went back there, he started working for his father-in-law. His father-in-law was an auctioneer. And he told me about the way he worked for his father-in-law. But he couldn't get along with his father-in-law. He didn't like the way his father-in-law operated. The father-in-law would send him over to talk to one of the judges, and he'd put several $20 bills in a white envelope and he'd seal it with no name or anything on it, and he'd say, "You take this over and give it to Judge so-and-so." And the father-in-law, the judges would assign who would take care of the auctioning of some of the estates where people would die and they got to auction off their stuff. And so the way the father-in-law got his business was by, bribing them. He didn't like that. And another thing that really upset him was after his father-in-law, after he went back there to work with his father-in-law, his father-in-law would go out and buy, he would go buy a whole house full of furniture. Everything. And then they'd take it all down to the store and sort it out and decide whether to sell it or give it away or what to do with it. But they had one house they got furniture in, they got a trunk up in the attic. It was filled with postage stamps, old postage stamps. And his father-in-law put Al to work on those postage stamps, sorting them all out, getting them all organized, and when they finally got through with those postage stamps, I think that they sold that collection of postage stamps for better than $10,000, which is three times as much as they paid for everything in the house. And the father-in-law said thanks to him, but he never gave him, didn't give him any money for it at all. He paid almost minimum wages to him.
DS: Did he come out for his health? Or what did he come out here anyway?
RA: Came out for his wife's, well, tell you the truth, he came out cause he got mad at his father-in-law. I think. He got fed up with the way they were treating him back there.
DS: But he did go back after three years.
RA: Then he went back, yeah. Things change. You know you leave.
DS: Now to conclude our discussion Dick, when you left Glendale in 1955, right, you went over to the faculty at Arizona State. Now, you had seen some changes in town at that time, and this was on the verge, you might say, when the growth of Glendale really started. Did you see signs of that as you were leaving?
RA: Oh yes. In fact, ah, even when we started proposing we have second and third high schools, we told the community that we should expect to have several more high schools because there's no question about it, growth was coming because Glendale and the Washington area was the, local, logical location for growth in particular with I-17 going in. It was the, just the undisputable area in which growth was going to take place. I was there nine years, and we probably, I would judge that our high school enrollment, the year I left we had probably about probably 1,000 in Glendale and we probably had about 800 or 900 in Sunnyslope, and when we opened the Washington school I think we had pretty close to 500 the first year in Washington. And since I've left there, they built six more high schools.
DS: I think there are nine now.
RA: There are nine now, okay. Yeah, so we saw the growth coming, but ah, of course no one could exactly, I don't think we understood exactly how the growth would take place. And I think since then we've realized that a larger percentage of our population would be retired people, and that there'd be retirement homes being built. See, we didn't have retirement homes back in those days. Oh, there were...
DS: And never a hotel. Isn't that something?
RA: Yeah.
DS: Glendale still doesn't have a big hotel.
RA: Ah, wasn't, wasn't there one hotel across the street from where the post office used to be?
DS: Oh they had little hotels...
RA: Olive Hotel, wasn't that the Olive Hotel?
DS: That was in Tempe, but there was a Glenwood and there was a
RA: Glenwood, the Glenwood, yeah...been torn down.
DS: But I'm talking about there was no...
RA: Oh no, nothing big.
DS: There wasn't a Camelback or a San Marcos or anything like that.
RA: And even when they started building ah tourist, border home courts,...he had a few...not first class. No, and then there's the one where, there's still one there, I don't know what they call it now.
DS: But ah, one thing that's always puzzled me, is that the west side always seemed to lag about ten years behind the east side. What do you think the reason for that was? Ah, that was one thing, hotels, another was artistically. I'm sure you noticed that.
RA: Yes.
DS: Ah, what was the reason?
RA: Well I think part of the lag was the fact that it was very much of an agricultural community for so long, and a lot of the people in that area like the Japanese farmers and the Russian farmers and so forth, were not ah, active participants in community organizations and so forth. And I don't know why, but ah, you might say they lagged. There were a lot of good people there.
DS: It's finally coming now. It's just now beginning. Marie Sands has done a lot in the art field.
RA: Yeah.
DS: Do you know her?
RA: Oh yes.
DS: Yeah, uh-huh, and various other people. But there isn't a little gallery over there of any kind that I know of. And strangely enough there isn't a daily newspaper on the whole west side...On the east side every town has one. This puzzles me. Why this huge difference.
RA: How many newspapers do they have now? They have weeklies...In Glendale, Glendale.
DS: There's one weekly, the Star.
RA: Star. Just the one?
DS: Just the one. I was just over interviewing the publisher last, two weeks ago. But he publishes about, or prints about eight newspapers.
RA: Yeah.
DS: From one shop.
RA: You see, the whole economy's changed. Ah, a hundred years ago who ever thought of anybody having as many as eight newspapers? But it became such that if you bought the equipment to do your publishing, you might as well publish several at the same time. And we saw this coming on back in well, the late 50's and early 60's. There wasn't any way to predict some of these things. Of course, Pulliam came out and took over two papers. But he didn't try to put up...in the various communities like some publishers have done.
DS: No.
RA: I don't know. I can't give you an answer to that. I don't know why.
DS: There isn't a symphony orchestra in Glendale. This is the fourth largest city in the state. And you wonder, ah, even Gilbert has a symphony, Chandler has a symphony. Tempe. Mesa. Scottsdale. They all have community symphony orchestras. I'm just puzzled as to the reason.
RA: Well I don't know. I don't know the reason. But it's a conservative community. And ah, people.
DS: They're very proud of Saguaro Ranch Park. Had they started that before you left?
RA: Is that the one out north?
DS: Right next to the community college.
RA: No, that came on later. Yeah, that hadn't been.
DS: You're thinking of Thunderbird Park.
RA: Yeah, I'm thinking about Thunderbird Park, yeah. We (wife: you did some work on developing of Thunderbird Park) Have we done more on that Thunderbird Park? Have we done quite a bit out there? We haven't been out there, never.
DS: I think is sort of...
RA: ...sort of dying on the vine?
DS: Well, it hasn't moved as fast as they thought, but the Saguaro Ranch Park has developed...the city owns it and it was the old Bartlett Saguaro Ranch.
RA: Yeah, yeah, Saguaro Ranch, yeah.
DS: And they, part of it is the new library, the city library on the north side, and the community college is on the south side. And then...is where the historical society is. So it's, there's a lot of activity out there. It's near Olive and ah 59th Avenue. But that, boy that ten miles north of town, there, along 59th is really something. They've got, ah, of course the Graduate School of International Management, they've got Ironwood High School, they've got the hospital.
RA: Thunderbird Hospital.
DS: And finally, out at the end is Arrowhead Ranch which is a, now that's sort of stalled too, but ah, that's a ten miles that has really, it's amazing to see...
RA: Now, when I was in high school there, we used to go out north of the canal, out on the desert and hunt rabbits. There wasn't anything out there then.
DS: Reverend Tuckey tells about capturing wild horses and donkeys out there where the Graduate School is right now. Now you were in school with Bert Fireman.
RA: Well, Bert finished the year before I...
DS: That's right, he was a year ahead of you. You and Thelma were in the same class.
RA: And I only went to Glendale one year, my senior year.
DS: So you didn't know Bert in high school.
RA: No, cause Bert was ah, kind of a guy, you always knew Bert Fireman was around somewhere. He was a big guy and he'd be around school. His sister was in Bob's class.
DS: I never knew her.
RA: I...what her name was. Gertrude, Gertrude, Gertrude Fireman. She was a good student.
DS: Now they had Sam Fireman's grocery.
RA: Yeah.
DS: And they were the only Jewish people in town that I knew. There'd been a Newman family before that.
RA: Well, the...
DS: Sorta, they had been Jewish. But they had to go to Phoenix to the
RA: To the synagogue.
DS: I don't whether Glendale has a synagogue yet. Ah, I don't think so.
RA: I don't know, I really don't know. But then they got, quite a few Jewish came into the community...some of them were...
DS: Would you say it was a Wasp community?
RA: Oh yeah, yeah. I think, trying to think of the name of the man that ah had a clothing store right across from Lukins Pharmacy there. Hmmm, the name's in here somewhere. RV, no, hmmm.
DS: Well, to summarize then, I do need to wind this up, ah, you saw then that they were on the threshold in '55 when you left.
RA: ...
DS: But they really hadn't started annexing yet according to the records.
RA: No, I don't know whether that related to requiring that the laws be changed...I don't know the details on that.
DS: It wasn't until they annexed about half of Maryvale in 1960-61 that it really got started.
RA: It got started then.
DS: That was the big hunk that they...all at one time.
RA: And the same thing about the growth of Phoenix. You know, it was just a small community geographic-wise. And now it's spread out, I don't know how many square miles it includes, but a big territory now.
DS: Well I was amazed, Glendale is, it was ten miles west clear out to Luke and ten miles north out to Arrowhead Ranch. And Peoria's in the middle.
RA: Yeah, we just came back from California and came by way of Barstow and Kingman, six miles before we got to Barstow we saw the signs, Barstow City Limits. Still just desert. Nothing but desert. We went another two or three miles before we came on any houses.
DS: So you feel the kinship...went to school there, you principaled there, superintendent for a long time. So you still have a lot of friends over there?
RA: Well I think, we, yes, we don't see them as much as we, I'd say most of our friends now are former students. A lot of the people that were friends of ours when we were there are now gone.
DS: You moved to Prescott in what year?
RA: We went to, we went to Tempe in '55, and then we came up here in '82.
DS: So you've been up here almost ten years.
RA: It will be nine years in September. So we're beginning to feel like Prescott is home now.
DS: I'm sure you are. Bob, I want to thank you, ah, I'm sure the tape will be an addition to the library there at the Glendale Historical Society, and thanks a lot.
This is the end of the interview with Robert Ashe.